Rasul Jafarov, one of Azerbaijan's most prominent political activists, was sentenced to six and a half years in jail on Thursday, AFP and local media reported.
A court in Azerbaijan's capital Baku found Jafarov guilty of charges including embezzlement and tax evasion, his lawyer told AFP. The activist, who has led a series of campaigns that criticize the government of the small ex-Soviet country, was arrested last August.
International human rights groups, such as the Index on Censorship, condemned the move and dismissed the charges as trumped up. Human Rights Watch last year called on Azerbaijan's authorities to drop charges they called politically motivated.
Jafarov's "Sing For Democracy" campaign used Azerbaijan's hosting of the 2012 Eurovision Song Contest to draw attention to his country's poor human rights record. When he was arrested last year, he was planning a campaign to coincide with Azerbaijan hosting the first ever European Games, a kind of Olympics for Europe.
Azerbaijan has been increasingly cracking down on dissenters since a 2013 election, even as it tries to burnish its international reputation by hosting such big events, human rights advocates say.
In its condemnation of Jafarov's sentencing on Thursday, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, a group that has 57 member states around the world and promotes several aspects of human rights, listed out other Azerbaijani journalists and activists who had been recently jailed.
The United States is "deeply troubled" by Jafarov's sentence, the State Department said in a statement released Thursday, calling it a "further setback to Azerbaijan's democratic development" and urging the government to release him.