Azerbaijan's three most prominent opposition parties have been denied registration by the state and now face the possibility of being disbanded. 

They failed to meet the key criterion of the country's new highly restrictive law on political parties - proving that they have at least 5,000 members (through submitting a list with each member's name together with their phone number, address, and other details). 

Once a party is deregistered by the state, it is prohibited from operating "in any way," including holding meetings and making financial transactions. 

The Republican Alternative (REAL) Party, which is represented in the country's near-totally pro-government parliament with one member, was the first victim.

On July 17, REAL's chair, Ilgar Mammadov, shared the news that the Ministry of Justice, which handles parties' registration applications, denied REAL's, claiming there were discrepancies in their members list. 

"They [ministry] say, 'We have contacted [by phone] the members whose names you indicated in the application. 986 people stated that they are not members of the party. You have given your office number as the phone number of 1,058 other people, which we do not consider acceptable. Information about 2,527 people (name, surname, date of birth) was not found in the State Population Register (probably due to typos). Finally, the names of 68 people were repeated, and 16 people were dead. Thus, the names of only 463 people in the list of the party were considered valid,'" he wrote on Facebook. 

According to the law, Mammadov added, the party has one month to either correct the information of more than 4,500 members, find new members, or "disband the party." 

The next victim was Musavat, a party founded in 1911, during Russian imperial rule. 

On July 19, the head of the party Arif Hajili reported that the Ministry of Justice denied the party's application for registration "as expected." 

"The letter we received says that information about 2,766 people in the list of 5,212 people we presented should be clarified because they were not entered correctly; 250 people said by phone that they were not party members, information about 11 people was repeated, etc," he said. 

Later that day, the same announcement was made by the Popular Front Party, which has its origins in the era of the Soviet collapse and briefly held the presidency in the turbulent early days of independence. 

Party chair Ali Karimli announced on Facebook that the PFAP, too, had received "the ministry's famous negative response." The ministry told the party that nearly 2,500 members' information was wrong, 119 were members of other parties (which is also prohibited by the law); 59 were duplicates; and 609 denied their membership when contacted by the ministry - all of which Karimli called "absolutely not convincing". 

"We will use all legal means. Even when the legal paths are blocked, there are political paths before us. We will not reconcile with the government's policy of destroying the real opposition and creating a one-party system," he proclaimed. 

The deregistration and dissolution of parties have been going on since the law came into force this January. But so far it has been mostly pro-government parties created as satellite parties of the ruling New Azerbaijan Party, that have been disbanding themselves. On July 18, the ministry stated that 31 parties had done so thus far.

Amid this tendency, one prominent opposition party leader was arrested. Gubad Ibadoglu, chair of the Democracy and Prosperity Party, and a visiting fellow at London School of Economics, was sentenced to a 4-month pre-trial detention on a counterfeit money charge. 

Ibadoglu's announcement earlier this month that he would seek to recover money that the "Azerbaijani government stole from Azerbaijani people" and stashed in bank accounts in the West and channel these funds into an educational fund was widely seen by some regime critics as the real reason for his detention. 

But others saw his arrest in the context of the government's quest to further shrink the political space and ultimately create a one-party system. 

Ibadoglu had been trying to register his party, but failed six times - most recently in early July. In an interview with local outlet Pressklub.az at the time, he said the party would continue to operate in some form no matter the legal consequences.

"Contrary to the nature of the law and the registry, he [Ibadoglu] decided to keep his organization running as a movement. No matter how correct this decision was in the current situation, the authorities were caught on the back foot, it was a move against the new order," journalist Shemshad Aga wrote. 

Some independent journalists in Azerbaijan have criticized REAL, Musavat and PFAP for trying to comply with the new law after the authorities compromised and slightly relaxed its stringent requirements. The parties should not have tried to play a game they could never win, they argue.

(Azerbaijani independent journalists have refused to abide by a similar law setting up a media registry. Now they too face being prohibited to work by court order.) 

"Our pseudo-democrats [opposition parties] were relaxed when the threshold for membership was reduced from 10,000 to 5,000. They thought, 'We can do that!' They ran to deliver their members' list to the ministry. Guess what? It turned out to be an unsolvable equation," wrote journalist Elmaddin Shamilzade.