Gubad Ibadoghlu, also spelled Gubad Ibadoglu, (; born 12 September 1971) is an Azerbaijani anti-corruption advocate, a scholar, a critic of oil and gas industry, and a prominent human rights and environmental defender, who from 2021 has been a research fellow at the London School of Economics. He was supposed to start a new teaching position at TU Dresden in 2023. However, on July 23, 2023 he was arrested in Azerbaijan and remains under investigation. The international community has condemned his arrest as arbitrary and politically motivated. Greens–European Free Alliance nominated Dr Gubad Ibadoghlu for the Sakharov Prize in September 2024. On 17 October 2024, 2024 Sakharov Prize finalists were shortlisted by MEPs. Following the secret ballot, MEPs selected the three finalists for the 2024 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and Dr Gubad Ibadoghlu became one of the three finalists. He was also nominated for 2025 Nobel Peace Prize by Rutgers University professor Belinda Davies.
On April 22, 2024 Gubad Ibadoghlu was transferred to house arrest. The medical examination revealed that his aorta root has expanded to the point where he needs immediate surgery. TU Dresden published a statement urging the Azerbaijani government to allow him to travel to Germany to start his work there.
European Court of Human Rights has implemented interim measures using the Rule 39 of the court due to his health condition being critical and has given his cases a priority under Article 41. The court ruled that Gubad Ibadoghlu is in urgent need of medical care and hospitalization.
Biography
Academic career Gubad Ibadoghlu received his PhD in economics in 2000 at Azerbaijan State University of Economics.
During his career, he had been a researcher at the Higher Economic School, Warsaw in 1999/2000, the Central European University, Budapest in 2004/2005, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2008/2009, a visiting professor under the Fulbright Program at Duke University in 2015/2016, a research fellow at Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 2017/2018, and at Rutgers University in 2018-2021. Aside from being a professor, he also gave various talks at universities, the most notably at Oxford University.
Dr. Gubad has been NED Reagan–Fascell Democracy fellow since 2015, researching "the Political Economy of Natural Resources in the Caspian Basin Countries: Challenges for Transitions to Democracy". Furthermore, Dr. Gubad was a fellow at Prague Civil Society in 2018, researching Azerbaijani corruption and analyzing money laundering. Ibadoghlu's work was partly about analysis of the rise and prevalence of corruption in Azerbaijan and other post-Soviet countries to the fact that their exports are dominated by oil and gas. He wrote opinion pieces and reports on lack of economic transparency, financial accountability, and dysfunctional economic models implemented by the authorities of extractive industry in the region. Gubad Ibadoghlu has also published more than twenty books in the area of politics on natural resources and revenue management. He focused on good governance and "petro-authoritarianism", alternative energy, analyzing how oil and gas revenues have fueled corruption and authoritarianism in post-Soviet states. He is paying specific attention to the political effects of natural resources in the Caspian Sea Basin regions, including Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia.
He published research regarding the effects of COVID-19 on policy making in Azerbaijan during and after the pandemic and the effects of the second Karabakh war.
In his recent lengthy article published in the Resources Policy, Ibadoghlu argued that, based on the empirical findings, "the oil-hinders-democracy hypothesis is valid for the oil-rich nations of the post-Soviet space." The paper focused on several resource-rich countries, including Azerbaijan.
Most recently, Dr. Gubad published a number of articles focusing on the EU oil and gas deal; Dr. Gubad warned about the misrepresented data from Azerbaijan regarding oil and especially gas. Dr. Gubad argued that gas would be provided from Russia and Turkmenistan sources, and with further continuation of the deal, human rights in Azerbaijan will be eradicated.
Ibadoghlu on multiple occasions criticized the Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev, the political regime and the corruption that exists within the state institutions of Azerbaijan.
Anti-corruption work
In his many engagements and roles over the years Dr Gubad Ibadoghlu has worked towards bringing light to the low transparency and accountability that exists within the higher echelons of the Azerbaijani government. He published papers discussing how many of the large scale international events in Azerbaijan, such as Formula One races, are organized by companies owned by relatives of the state officials and how this leads to large scale misappropriation of funds.
Dr Gubad Ibadoghlu has been a steadfast voice against Azerbaijan's corruption. As a board member of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) from 2013 to 2019, he staunchly advocated for transparency, even in the face of government pressure. His refusal to comply with government regulations led to his summoning to the prosecutor office and the levying of ongoing criminal charges against his NGO from 2015.
He is a member of the Working Groups on "Grand Corruption and State Capture" and "Asset Stolen Recovery" of the UNCAC Coalition—Association for the Implementation of the UN Convention against Corruption and a local expert in the Anti-Corruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia of the Istanbul Anti-Corruption Action Plan (IAP) 5th Round of the Monitoring Assessment Framework of the OECD.
He founded in June an organization in the United Kingdom, Azerbaijani Youth Educational Foundation, to support Azerbaijani youth abroad, to be funded by donations and assets confiscated from corrupt Azerbaijani elites abroad, such as those partially recovered by the UK in the "Azerbaijani Laundromat" anti-corruption case, a high-profile case involving the laundering of billions of dollars from Azerbaijan.
In his 2022 paper discussing SOCAR, Dr Gubad has criticized the company for nepotism, lack of financial transparency and ineffective leadership, which is appointed by the president Aliyev himself. According to Dr Gubad these factors lead to growing debts of SOCAR. In the same paper he states that due to the lack of any legislative framework the government can allocate as much money to SOCAR as it wishes and take as much money as it wishes, allowing for numerous quasi-fiscal expenditures in sports and media.
Dr Ibadoghlu has extensively documented the corruption and abuses within among the Azerbaijani elites. In several papers published in the years preceding his arrest he investigated the appropriation of the agricultural land in Karabakh following Second Karabakh War. He discovered that the ability to use these lands was exclusive to the president's Aliyev close circle of allies and relatives and their companies. In another paper on a similar topic he discusses how these companies, while being monopolies, are also given subsidies and benefits from the state budget, thus exacerbating the extent of corruption.
Civil rights activism Ibadoghlu has previously worked at the Economic Research Center, a Baku-based think tank promoting good governance in Azerbaijan, and served in the Steering Committee of the EU Eastern Partnership's Civil Society Forum (2011-2012) as one of founding members, as well as a civil society's representative to the international board of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) for 2013–2019. He continues to cooperate with the Eastern Partnership' Civil Society Forum on a number of topics and has been a contributor to the Eastern Partnership Index for a number of years. He also served as a member of the steering committee at Black Sea NGO Forum, a member of Strategy Advisor Group at Publish What You Pay International Coalition (PWYP), of which he is also a founding member. Currently, he is a member of the Advisory Board of the CAREC Think Tank Network, chairman of the Board of Azerbaijan Think Tank Alliance (ATTA), a member of Working Groups on "Grand Corruption and State Capture" and "Asset Stolen Recovery" of the UNCAC Coalition – Association for the Implementation of the UN Convention against Corruption and local expert in Anti-Corruption Network for Eastern Europe and Central Asia of the Istanbul Anti-Corruption Action Plan (IAP) 5th Round of Monitoring Assessment Framework of the OECD. He conducted research for UNICEF, World Bank, Oxfam GB, OSF, EU, GIZ, USAID, UNDP, WB, OSCE, NRGİ, OSI and Asian Development Bank.
Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu was fired from Azerbaijan State University of Economics for his civil rights activism in 2019, where he worked as a lecturer until 2014 and continued to collaborate remotely until 2019.
Dr. Gubad has been a research team leader for USAID and Transparency International's Azerbaijan funding project on "Partnership for Transparency" from February 2013 to February 2016. He worked as International Consultant in the World Bank and IETI projects from December 2015 to January 2016 and projects of USAID and UNDP from January 2014 to May 2015 in Kyrgyzstan. Dr. Gubad was also a researcher at the EU funding project "The effective system of public finances control (PFC)" from July 2012 to April 2014. He is one of the commentators for IMF's Article 4 reports on Azerbaijan and has represented and given speeches on the situation of Azerbaijani civil society in World Bank, EBRD, and IMF Annual Meetings.
NGO crackdown in Azerbaijan started in mid-2012, and many NGOs decided to protest the actions of the Azerbaijani government. On 17 December 2013, Dr. Gubad organized a protest in front of the presidential administration and submitted the protest statement from the civil society. In August 2014, in conjunction with the investigation into international donors and their grantees, the authorities froze the bank accounts of the Economic Research Centre (ERC) and its director, Gubad Ibadoghlu.
The government's refusal to register a grant the ERC received in 2014 paralyzed the organization's work. Ibadoghlu told Human Rights Watch that he has twice attempted to register the grant, but that the Ministry of Justice refused, claiming that a requirement of the grant contract signed with the donor—that unused portions of the grant should be returned to the donor—was not consistent with Azerbaijani legislation.
However, the government also did not allow the grant to be returned and started criminal investigation against Dr. Gubad and ERC under falsified charges of the unpaid tax. The unpaid tax penalty poses further threats to the ERC and Ibadoghlu as ERC director. The penalty was able to sentence him for two to seven years' imprisonment. Therefore Dr. Gubad has been in exile since 2015 January and is member of New University in Exile Consortium.
On 16 February, ECtHR ruling recognized the violation of Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 in regards to freezing Dr. Gubad and ERC's bank account in the case of Imranova and others v. Azerbaijan, application no. 74254/14 and 74299/14. Later on 23 February 2023, ECtHR ruled that preventing Dr. Gubad Ibadoghlu from registering the Public Initiative Center, another NGO focusing on civil rights, is a violation of Article 11 in the case of Bayramov and Imanov v. Azerbaijan, application no. 79522/13.
Government criticism