A prominent Azerbaijani investigative journalist has been released on probation after her detention was widely criticised by activists and human rights organisations.

Khadija Ismayilova, who had delved into the wealth of the country’s first family, was arrested in December 2014 and sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in jail in September last year.



She was freed by the country’s supreme court on Wednesday after judges ruled her sentence would be changed to a three-and-a-half-year suspended term.

Speaking after she left court, Ismayilova said she would persist with her reporting and push for a full acquittal. “I will continue my journalist work with renewed energy,” she said. “I feel younger and more energetic, and I will fight until the end.”

A group of wellwishers gathered outside the court with balloons to celebrate the verdict, which has come two days before Ismayilova’s 40th birthday.

Her trial was widely seen as politically motivated, and revenge for her award-winning reporting. In her work for Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, she carried out a number of investigations that linked president Ilham Aliyev and his family to alleged corruption scandals.

On Wednesday, her lawyer, Fariz Namazli, said the supreme court had dropped charges of embezzlement and abuse of power charges but kept the charges of tax evasion and illegal business activity.

Under the terms of probation, Ismayilova is required to reside in Baku, the capital, and is forbidden from traveling abroad for five years without official permission.

At the same time as Ismayilova’s arrest, Azerbaijan’s authorities also raided RFE/RL’s Baku bureau and sealed it shut. The oil-rich country is run by Aliyev, who took over when his father died in 2003, and little dissent is tolerated. A number of other rights activists, journalists and lawyers have been imprisoned in the country on charges widely decried as politicised, though a group of them were released earlier this year.

In her initial trial, Ismayilova told the court it was ironic she was being charged with tax evasion. She said: “To accuse the person who investigated the presidential family’s stolen money stored in offshore accounts, its abuse of state deals and of contracts with offshore companies and groups, and its evasion of taxes, was very funny.”

Before her arrest, Ismayilova was subjected to a campaign of intimidation and harassment, including intimate footage of her, obtained using clandestine cameras, being posted online. She claimed she had been told the material would not be published if she desisted her anti-corruption investigations, but decided to go ahead with them.



She told the court she would not be broken by imprisonment, even if she had to spend 15 or 20 years behind bars, and issued a number of defiant statements from detention.

Ismayilova won the 2015 Pen/Barbara Goldsmith Freedom to Write award, and on Wednesday, Suzanne Nossel, executive director of Pen America, said in a statement: “The release on probation of Khadija Ismayilova, an intrepid force exposing corruption in Azerbaijan, is a victory for journalists everywhere who go up against the toughest regimes bent on silencing those who dare challenge them.”

Human rights lawyer Amal Clooney drew the ire of Azerbaijan’s authorities for taking on Ismayilova’s case at the European court of human rights.

Nina Ognianova, of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said: “Today’s ruling ordering Khadija Ismayilova freed is cause for celebration, but doesn’t erase the rank injustice of her imprisonment for a year and a half on retaliatory charges. We call on Azerbaijani authorities to remove the conditions on her freedom and to release all journalists imprisoned for their work immediately.”