NGOs criticize yet another COP in an authoritarian, oil-producing country; Azerbaijan condemns “smear campaign”
For the third year in a row, the United Nations Conference on Climate Change will take place in an oil-producing country with a history of human rights abuses. In November, Azerbaijan hosts COP29 and, like Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in previous editions, its Government has made it clear that it will not tolerate criticism outside the context of the conference – especially regarding political prisoners in the country.
“It’s really in bad taste – we see it as hostile acts against Azerbaijan. Overloading the COP agenda with issues that do not have direct and immediate links to climate change is not useful, but harmful”, considered the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Azerbaijan, Hikmet Hajiyev, when “POLITICO”.
Azerbaijan is considered by the organization Freedom House to be a “consolidated authoritarian regime” and one of the least democratic countries in the world. In September last year, Azeri forces invaded the Nagorno-Karabakh region, forcing 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee, an action that drew accusations of ethnic cleansing and forced displacement by the international community.
Last week, just over a month before the climate conference in Baku, several non-governmental organizations called on the European Union and other institutions to condemn the increase in “arbitrary detentions” by the Government of Azerbaijan. The NGOs called for “concrete human rights commitments” to be linked to commercial relations with the Central Asian country, which grew with the need to replace the supply of Russian fuels in other areas of the globe.
“The recent wave of arrests and charges has sown fear among the remaining critical and independent voices. An increasing number of civil society activists have left the country since November 2023, reducing the diversity of organizations and activists who speak out about human rights and challenge the Government”, pointed out the reportsigned by Human Rights Watch and Freedom Now. In the United States, almost 60 congressmen signed an open letter demanding that the Biden Administration “demand the immediate and unconditional release of all political and war prisoners”.
For the first time, the agreement at COP28 calls on countries to stop using fossil fuels, but without establishing phased targets for their “elimination”
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However, the Azeri Government considers that NGO reports and news about abuses are “a campaign of defamation and dirty propaganda” against the country, and stressed that “there is no place for ideology” at COP29, only “science”.
“Such naive attempts cannot divert us from achieving our noble mission of managing the negative impacts of climate change,” said President Ilham Aliyev, at a meeting on the COP organization in Baku on Thursday.
And Hikmet Hajiyev reiterated that talking about human rights at the climate conference is counterproductive, guaranteeing that “Azerbaijan will do everything in its power to play a role as a bridge between nations”, to reach “a historic” and ambitious agreement for a climate transition in developing countries.
The choices made by COP organizations have been heavily criticized by activists and human rights organizations. In 2022 and 2023, Egypt and the UAE were accused of using the media attention from the climate conference, and the presence of a diverse and international audience, to clean up the image of regimes known for silencing opposition, journalists and critics.
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At COP27, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights denounced “acts of harassment and intimidation” by the Egyptian authorities, who tried to prevent protests on the sidelines of the event. The following year, the conference took place in Dubai – one of the major centers of the oil industry in the Middle East – and several international organizations boycotted the event as they considered that the United Arab Emirates did not have the democratic conditions to host COP28.
According to the latest report from the Amnesty Internationalthe number of individuals detained in Azerbaijan for political reasons increased considerably after the adoption of laws restricting press freedom, and the illegal occupation of Nagorno-Karabakh, with almost 250 people estimated to be detained as political prisoners.
