Ilgar Mammadov

Chairman, Republican Alternative

Azerbaijan

Ilgar Mammadov is the leader of an Azerbaijani political party called Republican Alternative (REAL) which stands for the institutionalization of a Republican form of government as opposed to the existing de facto family reign. A year after his election as a chairman, and immediately after the statement of his intention to run for presidency, Mr. Mammadov was deprived of his freedom and spent almost 6 years in prison, missing the presidential elections of 2013 and 2018. Later, the European Court of Human Rights issued an unprecedented judgment in 2019, declaring all the government actions resulting from the initiation of criminal proceedings against him “vitiated”. Mr. Mammadov has an MA degree in Political Economy from the Central European University in Budapest, and a graduate degree in History from the Moscow State Lomonosov University.