Azerbaijan is on the verge of establishing a media “super-regulator” with unprecedented powers, Reporters without Borders said in an announcement. Published on the organizations website, it reads:
The bill creating a Media and Broadcasting Council — examined by Parliament at its second reading on Tuesday, 30 June — would concentrate the regulation, funding, training and oversight of the entire media sector in a single institution. For Reporters Without Borders (RSF), the reform amounts to the return of a Ministry of Information, designed to strengthen state control over the last spaces where independent information still circulates, particularly digital platforms.
Presented as a simple administrative reform, the creation of the Media and Broadcasting Council marks a turning point. The Azerbaijani parliament is set to merge the country’s two main media regulators into a single institution with unprecedented powers. The government says it wants to adapt the regulatory framework to an environment in which the boundaries between the press, broadcast media and digital platforms have disappeared. It has also cited the need to defend “national information security” and the “economic independence of the media”.
But Azerbaijani experts say the reform has another objective: to strengthen the state’s ability to control a media landscape in which the main spaces for independent information have shifted to digital platforms.
At the same time, repression of independent journalists has intensified. At least 25 journalists are currently detained. In 2026, Azerbaijan entered the bottom 10 countries in RSF’s World Press Freedom Index, ranking 171st out of 180 countries.
In this context, the future Council appears less like an administrative reform and more like the culmination of a strategy to centralise control over the media. For several Azerbaijani experts, the new Council is a modern revival of the former Ministry of Press and Information, abolished in 2001 as part of media liberalisation reforms. There is one major difference: control no longer focuses only on the press, television and radio, but also on digital platforms — YouTube, Telegram, Facebook and Instagram — which have become the main channels through which Azerbaijanis can still access independent information.
