(Reuters) - Ruben Vardanyan, a former top official in the ethnic Armenian administration of Nagorno-Karabakh which Azerbaijan retook in 2023, announced a second hunger strike on Wednesday in protest against his criminal trial in Baku.
"Today, I have decided to protest by declaring a hunger strike against the judicial farce being carried out against me," Vardanyan said in a statement via his lawyers.
The 56-year-old billionaire banker was arrested by Azerbaijani forces in September 2023, along with several other senior Karabakh officials while attempting to cross into Armenia amid a mass exodus of the region's roughly 100,000 ethnic Armenians after Azerbaijan captured the territory in a lightning offensive.
Vardanyan, who served in the number-two position in Karabakh in 2022-2023, is currently on trial in Baku, where he faces life in prison for 42 charges including terrorism. Another 15 former officials as well as civilian and military figures are on trial separately.
Vardanyan has filed multiple petitions to the Baku court, saying he and his local lawyer had not been given enough time to review the indictment against him, and that the 422 volumes of evidence had been presented in Azeri, a language he does not speak.
Azerbaijan says the trial is open to the public, but Vardanyan's lawyers say only state media are allowed in. A Reuters reporter was denied access to the courtroom on the first day of the trial on January 17.
Vardanyan's son David said he spoke with his father on Tuesday by phone. David Vardanyan said his father had told him that he had launched the hunger strike because he had "run out of any other means to draw attention (to his case)."
"We hope that it will end soon," David Vardanyan told Reuters. "There's obviously a huge risk to his health."
Vardanyan, who went on a 20-day hunger strike last April, has previously complained of mistreatment in Baku's custody. Azerbaijan's prosecutor general has said his rights were being respected and he had received visits from the International Committee of the Red Cross.
(Reporting and writing by Lucy Papachristou, Editing by William Maclean)
