Full legal context
Azerbaijan scores 2.25 % on the Rainbow Map and has been last of the 49 countries ILGA-Europe measures every year since 2015. Five of its seven categories are zero. There is no law against being gay here, and that is the thing to understand about the place: the harm is done without one.
Sex between men stopped being a crime on 1 September 2000, when the Soviet-era provision was repealed as a condition of joining the Council of Europe. Nothing was built on it. There is no anti-discrimination law naming sexual orientation or gender identity, no hate crime provision, and no procedure for changing the gender marker on documents. What exists instead is a pattern of police operations in which large numbers of people are detained at once, roughly once every few years, with no charge that has anything to do with who they are.
Here is the historical overview of the legalisation of homosexuality and gay rights in Azerbaijan.
Phase I: Decriminalisation as an Accession Condition (2000 to 2001)
2000: The criminal code provision is repealed on 1 September. Azerbaijan joins the Council of Europe in January 2001. Twenty-five years later the accession commitments on anti-discrimination are still unmet.
Phase II: The 2017 Raids (2017)
2017: Over about a fortnight in September, police detain at least a hundred people in Baku. Those released describe beatings, forced medical examinations, shaved heads and blackmail, and most were held for up to twenty days or fined for administrative offences that were never about what the raid was about. The UN human rights office raised the alarm publicly. Nobody was prosecuted for any of it.
Phase III: Violence Without a Category (2018 to 2024)
Killings of gay and trans people are reported regularly and rarely produce a prosecution that names the motive, because the law provides no category for it. Activists who become visible tend to leave the country. Of the handful of groups working here, none is registered as an LGBTI organisation, because that registration is not available to them.
2024: In January the delegation of Azerbaijan stops taking part in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe after its credentials are challenged. The country remains a member state, so the European Court of Human Rights is formally still available.
Phase IV: The Labyrinth Raid (2025 to 2026)
2025: On the night of 27 December, police raid the Labyrinth, a queer-friendly club in central Baku, and detain 106 people. Witnesses describe phones confiscated and searched without a warrant, detainees held outdoors in a freezing courtyard for up to five hours without adequate clothing, food or water, heads shaved, one person urinated on and another left with broken teeth.
2026: Human Rights Watch publishes its account on 14 January. Nafas LGBTI Azerbaijan Alliance, Minority Azerbaijan and two further groups collect the testimony. No officer has been charged.
