Foreigners make up 2.2% of Azerbaijan's prison population, report says

Foreign nationals represented a substantial share of the prison population in some prison systems and a very small proportion in others, for several reasons, including migration flows, legal frameworks, and geopolitical factors, the Council of Europe’s newly released 2025 annual penal statistics on prison populations (SPACE I) reveal.

Overall, in Europe, 17% of inmates were non-citizens. The fact that the average proportion of European Union nationals among foreign inmates was 27% reflects European mobility and the EU's framework of freedom of movement, which allows citizens to live and work across member states.

Prison systems with particularly high proportions of foreign nationals included Luxembourg (78%), Switzerland (73%), Cyprus (54%), Austria (53%), Slovenia (52%), Catalonia (Spain) (52%), Greece (52%), Malta (51%), Germany (47%) and Belgium (43%), in countries with over 500,000 inhabitants. The lowest proportions were to be found in Romania (1.1%), Republic of Moldova (1.9%) and Azerbaijan (2.2%).