In international relations, how a country is written about is often as consequential as what it does. Over the past ten days, several pieces appeared in quick succession across major Western outlets (e.g., Poland’s TVP World, Britain’s The Independent, the BBC’s Russian Service, and The Guardian), each touching on Azerbaijan in its own way. To foster understanding, it is essential to specify the standards-such as factual accuracy, context, and balanced perspectives-that should guide coverage of Azerbaijan, ensuring consistency and credibility in reporting.

By Vasif Huseynov
Baku’s frustration is not that its record is being examined. A country as consequential as Azerbaijan, sitting at the intersection of European energy security, Caspian connectivity, and a fragile peace process with Armenia, should expect scrutiny.

The frustration is narrower and more specific: several of these pieces appear to have skipped a step that professional journalism normally insists upon – seeking, and reflecting, the other side.

Take the Guardian’s review of a documentary on the Karabakh war. A review of a film is, by genre, an aesthetic judgment rather than an act of reporting. No one expects a critic to conduct shuttle diplomacy before writing about a documentary.

But when that review’s own framing describes the suffering of Karabakh Armenians without a single line acknowledging the war’s other half (the earlier conflict that preceded it, the occupation of Azerbaijani territory, or the hundreds of thousands of Azerbaijanis displaced along the way), the reader is left with half a conflict, presented as the whole of it. That is a clear omission, disinformation, and definitely not journalism.

The record being omitted here is not a matter of competing interpretation but of documented facts. Four United Nations Security Council resolutions, adopted in 1993, demanded the withdrawal of occupying forces from Azerbaijani territory and reaffirmed the country’s sovereignty over Karabakh.

Over the near three decades of occupation that followed, up to 700,000 Azerbaijanis were forcibly displaced from their homes in Karabakh and the surrounding districts, with thousands killed, tortured, or taken hostage.

None of this appears in the review, whose opening image- a “bombed-out school” in the Talish village – is presented as evidence of Azerbaijani aggression without noting that the village sat on the line of contact and was repeatedly struck from both directions during the fighting. An image of ruin, offered without that context, functions as an accusation rather than a description.

The story did not end with the ceasefire. The occupation left the liberated territories seeded with as many as a million landmines, a legacy that has killed or injured hundreds of Azerbaijanis attempting to return home since 2020, and that continues to obstruct the resettlement the peace process is meant to enable.

A review willing to describe the destruction of a school in the Talish village might equally have mentioned the minefields that still separate Azerbaijani families from the villages the film otherwise mourns. That the two halves of the same war are not treated with the same narrative weight is, again, the point: not fabrication, but a selective allocation of empathy that a documentary review, unlike a news report, is rarely asked to justify.

But omission, repeated often enough across otherwise reputable outlets, becomes its own kind of narrative.

Or take the specific factual question in The Independent’s report on the detention of an opposition figure. The article characterises the charge against him in terms suggesting treason, which is a serious word, and an imprecise one; the actual charge concerns alleged actions aimed at the violent seizure of power and the forcible alteration of the constitutional order, a different matter with a different legal meaning.

Precision here is not a small thing. Readers form judgments about a country’s rule of law from exactly these details, and a mischaracterised charge shapes that judgment as surely as an invented one would.

The possible explanation for this misinformation is also the more uncomfortable one for Western newsrooms: that a set of assumptions about Azerbaijan, formed years ago about a small, oil-rich, post-Soviet state on Europe’s periphery and also through the lens of Orientalism, has calcified into a paradigm through which new facts are read, one that no longer requires active verification because it feels self-evidently plausible.

Framing of this kind does not need an editorial memo to spread. It propagates through habit, through the sources a reporter already knows how to reach quickly, and through new details made to fit an existing story rather than complicate it.

That habitual lens is not the whole story, however. Some of this framing is actively cultivated: lobbying by Armenian diaspora organisations and pro-Russian oligarchs such as Samvel Karapetyan has kept such narratives alive in Western newsrooms and political circles, precisely as Yerevan and Baku negotiate peace.

Such narratives conveniently serve actors like Russia, which has its own interest in keeping Azerbaijan estranged from its Western partners, and Western media should be careful not to let itself be instrumentalised in that contest.

The answer to the question posed at the outset should not be a reflexive accusation of bias, nor a demand that Western media give Azerbaijan favourable coverage. It is a more basic demand for consistency.

Azerbaijan should be scrutinised, challenged, and held to the same standards as any other country – but those standards should include historical context, factual precision, source diversity, and a genuine effort to represent competing perspectives.

When those standards are applied selectively, even without deliberate intent, the result is a distorted picture of the country and of the conflicts in which it has been involved. For Western media, particularly as Azerbaijan becomes increasingly important to Europe’s energy security, connectivity and regional diplomacy, correcting that imbalance is not a favour to Baku.

In the end, it is all a matter of journalistic credibility.