Cop29: climate leader or fossil regime?

The name Gubad Ibadoghlu may sound new to some readers, but it’s on him that the Azeri government is making a show of force against climate activists.

Ibadoghlu, a senior visiting fellow at the London School of Economics, was severely beaten by police and arrested in 2023, after he criticised the country’s oil and gas policies. He was denied vital medical treatment during his detention, then released to house arrest, and now faces up to 17 years of sentence.

Markéta Gregorová, a Czech Green member of the European Parliament, nominated Ibadoghlu for the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, awarded for the first time in 1988 to Nelson Mandela no less. “It is vital that we recognise and support the struggle of the Azerbaijani opposition ahead of the COP29 conference in Baku”, she said to her fellow lawmakers, who ended up voting for a resolution to end the EU gas dependence on Azerbaijan.

The MEPs were just the latest institutional voice among many condemning the regime’s long standing domestic and extraterritorial repression of activists, journalists, opposition leaders, and others, including EU nationals. A repression that has noticeably intensified ahead of the UN climate summit, held from 11 to 22 November.

And Azerbaijan has more on its record: a large-scale military offensive against the Armenian region Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023. Yet, the presidency has been trying to frame the UN climate summit as a “peace COP”.

A paper by policy institute Chatham House also challenges Azerbaijan’s prospects for brokering a meaningful summit outcome. "The country’s fossil fuel-dependent economy and inexperience in environmental action suggest it will struggle to provide credible leadership" and "an authoritarian political culture resistant to critical scrutiny is also at odds with the principles of transparency and inclusion underpinning the UN system," the researchers – Ruth Townend, Laurence Broers, Arzu Geybulla, Glada Lahn, Dr Jody La Porte, James Nixey, Ľubica Polláková – wrote.

As much as hosting UN climate summits all across the world is crucial to fully engage developing countries in the negotiation process, the European press is putting the spotlight on the link between human rights and climate.

Commenting on recent events in a column for Le Monde, French former minister of foreign and European affairs Bernard Kouchner argues "the fight against climate change cannot be separated from respect for human rights". The international community has “to face its own contradictions”, Kouchner writes. “While France is more than ever plunged into political uncertainty, we must not lose sight of major international deadlines at a time when ecology should be the priority of our governments.”

“How can it justify holding such a crucial event in a country that deviates from international law, depends massively on hydrocarbons and flouts human rights by holding twenty-three Armenian hostages without valid reason who are dying in its jails? A year has not passed since the ethnic cleansing of the 120,000 Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh and Azerbaijan has already been awarded the right to host an event as prestigious as COP29. This choice raises questions on both humanitarian and ecological levels. The United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) appears to be acting as if the events of the past few months had not happened, giving Azerbaijan a blank check to continue violating international law.”

Last June, Thomas Latschan looked at the worrying situation in the country for DW.

“Azerbaijan is also one of the most corrupt countries in the world,” he noted. “Bribery has also been used deliberately outside of the country – in the Council of Europe [...] it became known that Baku had invited up to 40 members of the Council of Europe every year and showered them with expensive gifts.”

Latschan also noted that the fact that “this has not yet been criticised more harshly by the European Union is, according to observers, also due to the fact that Azerbaijan is increasingly perceived as an important oil and gas supplier. Since the start of the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, the EU has wanted to become more independent of Russian oil and gas. In 2022, Commission President Ursula von der Leyen therefore signed a letter of intent with Ilham Aliyev, according to which Brussels intends to double its gas imports from Azerbaijan in the following years.”

Emmanuel Clévenot and Justine Guitton-Boussion on Reporterre also called out “the dictatorship that hosts COP29 and represses environmentalists”. They interviewed Myrto Tilianaki, an advocacy officer at NGO Human Rights Watch, who explained: “Funding an association that is independent of the state becomes almost impossible. And if the authorities realise that an activist has nevertheless received money from abroad… then he is accused of smuggling.” A well-established strategy aimed at dissuading anyone from venturing into creating a counter-power.

There’s more, said The Guardian’s environment editor Damian Carrington: an investigation by Global Witness found out “scores of apparently fake social media accounts are boosting Azerbaijan’s hosting of the Cop29 climate summit”. “The accounts were mostly set up after July”, he notes, “at which time seven of the top 10 most engaged posts using the hashtags #COP29 and #COP29Azerbaijan were critical of Azerbaijan’s role in the conflict with Armenia, using hashtags such as #stopgreenwashgenocide. By September this had changed, with all of the top 10 most engaged posts coming from the official Cop29 Azerbaijan account.”
So, what can realistically be done? The “EU can save one of Azerbaijan’s political prisoners”, according to human rights lawyer and Ibadoghlu’s daughter Zhala Bayramova, who called for lawmakers to award her father with the Sakharov de facto enabling him to leave the country. She expressed all her concerns to EUobserver: “If a London School of Economics professor can be snatched off the street in broad daylight, then who is safe?”.