Afiyaddin Mammadov is a labour rights defender and trade union leader. He is the co-founder and Chairperson of the Confederation of Workers’ Desk Trade Unions ("Workers' Desk" or "Confederation"), an independent grassroots organisation established in 2022 to protect workers in precarious employment, particularly couriers and other gig-economy workers. Afiyaddin Mammadov was also a board member of the Democracy 1918 Movement until the organisation suspended its activities.

In February 2023, he was sentenced to 30 days of administrative detention on charges of petty hooliganism and disobeying the police. In August 2023, shortly after the Workers’ Desk supported a protest by delivery couriers over deteriorating working conditions, he was again sentenced to 30 days’ administrative detention. Other members of the Confederation were subsequently arrested and imprisoned, in what human rights organisations have described as a coordinated effort to suppress independent trade union activity in Azerbaijan.

On 20 September 2023, Mammadov was arrested near his home after an altercation with an unidentified man and was charged with intentionally inflicting grievous bodily harm, aggravated hooliganism involving a weapon and unlawfully carrying a bladed weapon. Mammadov denied the allegations, stating that he had been attacked and that the criminal case was fabricated in retaliation for his labour rights work. On 14 January 2025, the Baku Court on Grave Crimes sentenced him to eight years’ imprisonment. The Baku Court of Appeal upheld the conviction on 9 April 2025, and the Supreme Court rejected his cassation appeal in February 2026.