BAKU WITHOUT THE RIGHT TO A VOICE: CAN AN UNFREE CITY BE SAFE

Today, 17 May, #Baku hosts the opening of the 13th session of the World Urban Forum (#WUF13 / @WUF_UNHabitat ), the United Nations' flagship global conference on urbanization. The forum is expected to bring together around 40,000 participants from 182 countries and to be covered by some 1,000 accredited journalists. Its theme reads like a promise: "Housing the world: safe and resilient cities and communities." On the agenda are the global housing crisis, inclusivity, a reliable future. But it is precisely this polished facade that forces one uncomfortable question: can we seriously speak of a safe and resilient city when its own residents have been stripped of the right to govern it?

My name is Emin Huseynov. I am an Azerbaijani journalist and human rights defender, founder of the independent online TV channel Obyektiv TV and Executive Director of the Institute for Human Rights in Geneva. I have lived in forced exile in Switzerland since 2015, but Baku remains my hometown. I know it not from glossy brochures or sanitized routes prepared for foreign delegations. It is the city of my memory, of my work, of my pain and of my hope. And that is precisely why I cannot stay silent as it is once again being turned into a glittering international showcase for an authoritarian regime.

A STOREFRONT INSTEAD OF A CITY

Azerbaijani authorities have long and successfully used major international events to whitewash their political image. We have already seen this with Eurovision in 2012, the European Games in 2015, several Formula 1 Grand Prix, and the COP29 climate conference in 2024. Now it is the turn of the urban forum. Foreign delegates will, as tradition dictates, be shown the parade-ground picture: new stadiums, luxury hotels, illuminations, cultural centres and brand-new buses under slogans about a "green transition."

But a real city is not the lighting on the seafront promenade or a ceremonial facade. It is people. It is families who can be evicted from their own homes at any moment without adequate compensation. It is residents of the outskirts who spend decades knocking on doors trying to register property rights over their own dwellings. It is the wheelchair user, for whom an ordinary street is an obstacle course. And it is the journalist who should be able to write about corruption in construction without ending up in prison for it.

Behind that parade-ground glitter lies another Baku: a city of forced evictions, predatory development, demolished historical monuments, and oil-soaked wastelands where impoverished families have lived for decades. Over the past fifteen years, international and local human rights organizations have documented mass unlawful expropriations and home demolitions, with virtually no legal protection for the people of Baku. At the forum, there will be much talk about housing. But in our reality, the housing question is measured not in square metres but in the presence of any rights at all: protection from the developer's bulldozer, clean air, working sewage, an independent court. Without those, housing becomes a tool of dependency.

A CITY WITHOUT A MAYOR - AND HOSTAGES OF CLOSED BORDERS

Here is the central fact WUF13 guests should know: Baku has no elected mayor. The city is governed by the Head of the Executive Authority, appointed solely by the president. Residents of this multi-million-strong metropolis have no say whatsoever over land use, transport, budgets, or any other element of urban infrastructure. Municipalities formally exist, but they are a decoration without real powers or money, masking a rigid vertical of power. As the Council of Europe has rightly pointed out, Baku remains the only capital in the entire European space without a directly elected city government.

For delegates unfamiliar with the Azerbaijani context, the scale of this entrenchment of power must be made clear. Ilham Aliyev has ruled the country since 2003. He is now serving his fifth consecutive term, and all of those elections, according to international observers, were marred by large-scale falsification. He inherited power from his father, Heydar Aliyev, who was president from 1993 to 2003, and before that ran Soviet Azerbaijan as its Communist Party boss from 1969 onward. To cement the family's grip on the state, Ilham Aliyev appointed his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, as First Vice-President of the country. This family essentially owns and runs Azerbaijan.

The same logic of total control is projected onto the capital. Over the last thirty years, Baku has been run by only three men, all accountable solely to the presidential family: Rafael Allahverdiyev, Hajibala Abutalybov, and the current head of the executive authority Eldar Azizov. Residents have never elected any of them and have never had any means of holding them to account.

It must be stressed: the same problems observed in Baku exist in Azerbaijan's other large cities. In Ganja (over 300,000 residents), Sumgait (around 300,000), and Mingachevir (around 100,000), there are likewise no elected mayors and no local legislative bodies; these cities are run by exactly the same kind of presidential appointees. Moreover, because these cities lie on the periphery, the socioeconomic situation and the state of political freedoms there are even more dire than in the capital. If Baku is the parade-ground Potemkin village, the regional cities are its hidden back side, kept out of view of foreign delegates.

The culmination of this politics of isolation is that, since the 2020 pandemic, the Azerbaijani authorities have kept the country's land borders fully closed under contrived pretexts. About 2.5 million residents of Baku and millions of their fellow citizens are effectively deprived of the possibility of entering or leaving their own country by car or train. The only way to leave this "gilded cage," or to return to it, is by expensive air travel. Such an isolation is unprecedented for any modern urban environment and is a stark illustration of the regime's attitude towards the most basic freedom of movement of its citizens.

Without an elected government, without accountability, and without freedom of movement, urbanism becomes a fiction. It is meaningless to talk about "resilient communities" when the very community has been stripped of the right to a voice and the right to leave the country. The city may be convenient for the authorities and easily monitored by the security services, but "resilient" - no.

NO FREEDOM, NO RESILIENCE

The genuine resilience of a city is tested by a very simple question: can a journalist publish an investigation into a failed urban drainage system without ending up in a detention centre that same evening? Can residents go out on a peaceful protest against the felling of a park? In our case, the answer to both questions is no.

The urban environment and infrastructure projects of #Azerbaijan are riddled with corruption. In Transparency International's Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) @anticorruption, the country has consistently languished at the bottom of the global rankings: 30 out of 100 in the most recent report, and a shameful 22 the year before, formally placing Azerbaijan among the world's most corrupt states. The budgets of Baku are a black hole, hidden from public view.

This is no accident: in the country every mechanism of accountability has been dismantled. On the eve of the World Urban Forum, not a single independent civic institution or loud voice remains inside Azerbaijan capable of launching a mass campaign, of exposing problems of development, or of asking inconvenient questions of the forum's organizers.

Civil society has been destroyed both legislatively and physically. The authorities have stripped NGOs of any opportunity to receive grants from abroad, blocking international funding. Practically all leading activists and independent journalists are today behind bars - precisely because they once received legal support from international donors: this was used as the pretext for fabricated charges of "smuggling" and "illegal financing." The majority of surviving activists are forced to live under the heavy conditions of exile, facing the daily threat of transnational repression. Those who have remained inside the country are bound by total self-censorship, since any open critical word today means almost certain arrest.

The numbers confirm this reality concisely and mercilessly. Freedom House @freedomhouse in 2026 rates #Azerbaijan as an outright "Not Free" country, with 6 points out of 100. In the Reporters Without Borders @RSF_inter 2026 Press Freedom Index, Azerbaijan ranks 171st out of 180. When Ilham Aliyev came to power in 2003, the country sat in 71st place. A drop of one hundred positions over 23 years - the worst deterioration of press freedom among Council of Europe member states. According to human rights monitors and the European Parliament resolution of 18 December 2025, by the start of 2026 around 400 people were being held in Azerbaijani prisons on politically motivated grounds. Among them are 36 journalists, 9 of whom are women. Azerbaijan is a shameful global "leader" in the number of jailed journalists.

What does all this have to do with urbanism? Everything. Civil society - independent architects, ecologists, neighbourhood initiative groups, journalists - is the early-warning system of any normal city. They are the first to raise the alarm about unsafe development, corruption, inaccessible environments, environmental catastrophes. When those people are behind bars, the city goes blind. When the courts are in someone's pocket, the resident is left one-on-one with the state apparatus. "Resilience" under such conditions is just a pretty sign.

SAFETY - BUT FOR WHOM?

The authorities love to boast that Baku is a "safe" city. But let us be precise. There is a thing called the safety of the human being: protection from arbitrary rule, from torture, from corruption, from unlawful arrest, from unlawful eviction. And then there is the safety of the regime: total digital control, cameras on every corner, police and bans.

Today, Baku is safe exclusively for the authorities. But it is deadly for a journalist investigating embezzlement. It is unsafe for a family whose land has caught the eye of yet another developer. Unfortunately, the repression of the Azerbaijani authorities now reaches far beyond Azerbaijani cities. Repression catches up with critics even in exile, in cities such as Brussels, Paris, Mulhouse, Nantes, Tbilisi, and Geneva. The murder of human rights defender Vidadi Iskandarli and several assassination attempts against the blogger Mahammad Mirzali are stark examples of transnational repression reaching European cities.

I speak of this from personal experience. In February 2026, I directly asked President Aliyev and his wife, First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva, public questions about press freedom and the state of democracy in Azerbaijan, at the Munich Security Conference. Aliyev answered with what has by now become a notorious phrase: "Independent media do not exist anywhere in the world." The reaction of his wife, Mehriban Aliyeva, outwardly mocking, in essence containing a direct threat in the form of a "wish for me to stay healthy," was even clearer. Several days after my inconvenient questions to the ruling Aliyev couple, an attempt was made in Geneva on my life and an attempt to abduct me, accompanied by systematic surveillance. In parallel with the physical threat of elimination, the Azerbaijani authorities launched a massive smear campaign against me in the Azerbaijani state and private media under their control. In response to the continuing threats from the Azerbaijani authorities, I filed an official criminal complaint with the Prosecutor's Office of the Canton of Geneva under articles of the Swiss Criminal Code, including Article 260bis - preparatory acts for an intentional homicide.

This episode is the clearest illustration of the fact that the border of safety for critics of the Azerbaijani regime does not coincide with state borders. A city which today opens a forum on "safety and resilience" is acting against its own citizens far beyond its own borders. A city whose "order" rests on fear and police truncheons inside the country, and on the long arm of the security services outside it, cannot be called safe.

A QUESTION FOR WUF13 PARTICIPANTS

I am not calling on the delegates of the World Urban Forum to boycott it. The decisions have been made, the tickets have been bought. But I ask one thing of you: do not become an extra in this staged performance. Do not allow your presence to be used as an indulgence for the regime - as proof that in Azerbaijan "everything is fine."

Step beyond the protocol routes, the hotels, the comfortable conference halls. Ask the host side direct questions:

• Why do the people of Baku not elect their own mayor?

• Why are decisions changing the face of the capital taken behind closed doors?

• Why are those who write about the city's problems sitting in prisons, while independent media have been pushed abroad?

• Why have millions of people been held inside closed land borders for years?

• And - name out loud the political prisoners and prisoners of conscience: Ali Karimli, Tofig Yagublu, Anar Mammadli, Sevinj Vagifgizi, Hafiz Babali, Fazil Gasimov, Bahruz Samadov, Igbal Abilov, Farid Mehralizade, Ulviyya Ali, Fatima Movlamli, Khayala Aghayeva, Elnara Gasimova, and hundreds of others - and ask representatives of the Azerbaijani authorities: when will they be released?

Ask the representatives of UN-Habitat @UNHABITAT / @AnacludiaRossb1 : should not human rights, freedom of expression, and the presence of real local self-government be mandatory criteria when selecting a host city for such a forum? This is not interference in internal affairs; this is the very substance of your agenda. If we speak of the future of cities, we are bound to speak of freedom.

BAKU DESERVES BETTER

I write these lines not out of hatred but because Baku deserves so much more than to be a glossy curtain for dictatorship.

My city deserves elected government, independent courts, honest public transport. It deserves the preservation of its historical heritage, clean air, safe and inclusive streets. And, above all, it deserves citizens who are not afraid to speak out loud and who have the right to move freely around the world.

A Baku without an elected mayor is hosting a forum about the city of the future. But a city does not become resilient because it hosts international forums. A city becomes resilient when its residents have rights.

The status of being the host of an international forum does not make a city resilient. Police patrols do not make it safe. Without democracy, there can be no "city for all."

Holding #WUF13 in Baku is not a reason to close our eyes. On the contrary, it is a reason to open them as wide as possible.

Welcome to Baku. Try to see it not only as it is being sold to you, but also as it is lived in by its true owners: its citizens.

Emin Huseynov Geneva, Switzerland - 17 May 2026.

Emin Huseynov is an Azerbaijani journalist and human rights defender, a political refugee in Switzerland since 2015. He was stripped of Azerbaijani citizenship by a presidential decree of Ilham Aliyev on 14 June 2015; the European Court of Human Rights found this decision to be in violation of Article 8 of the Convention (Emin Huseynov v. Azerbaijan No. 2, 13 July 2023).