COP29 UN Climate Meeting Begins Under Shadows | Opinion

Representatives from around the world will gather this week at the annual United Nations climate conference, COP29, in Baku, Azerbaijan. The meeting takes place in the shadow of former President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, which promises billions of tons of extra carbon pollution. If the United States is set on a path toward deepening its reliance on fossil fuels, it’s difficult to hold out hope for an international consensus to end their use.
Doubts about the legitimacy of the conference have been present from the start. For the second year in a row, COP is taking place in a country that relies on fossil fuel extraction for its economy, and where dissent is criminalized, and activists are routinely detained. Just like Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, Azerbaijan is using a global meeting to greenwash its image.
This year’s COP seems particularly cynical. Under the banner of exploring the nexus between peace and climate, Azerbaijan promised to use its platform as host to call for an unprecedented global ceasefire, a first in the history of climate conferences. When congratulating Trump on his victory, Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan’s president for the past two decades, was proud to emphasize the two leaders’ shared commitment to fostering international peace. To anyone keeping track of Azerbaijan’s human rights record, this offends common sense.
A little more than a year ago, following a nine-month de facto blockade which left thousands deprived of access to food and medical assistance, Aliyev’s regime mounted a violent offensive in Nagorno-Karabakh, a semi-autonomous region inhabited almost exclusively by ethnic Armenians. In a horrific incident of ethnic cleansing, more than 100,000 people—almost all who’d never lived anywhere else—fled to Armenia with what they could carry.
Since regaining control of the area, Azerbaijani forces have launched a campaign targeting any trace of ethnic Armenian presence, destroying invaluable cultural and heritage sites. More than a means to celebrate a decisive military victory, this destructive campaign has helped pave the way for projects that will boost the country’s green credentials ahead of next week’s summit. Azerbaijan’s energy transition focuses heavily on transforming what remains of the depopulated enclave into a “green Silicon Valley” backed by private investors from Japan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and Saudi Arabia.
Anyone within the country who objects faces severe repercussions. Much like the UAE, Azerbaijan is a country where dissenters are routinely killed, assaulted, or imprisoned with impunity. The CIVICUS Monitor, a collaborative research project tracking civic freedoms worldwide, rates Azerbaijan as “closed,” it’s worst rating. It has had this classification since the project launched in 2018.
Protests, including environmental demonstrations, are routinely suppressed, and critical civil society groups have been dismantled. Independent media no longer operate in the country and dissenting voices have been silenced with fabricated criminal charges, travel bans, and frozen bank accounts.
Repression has intensified in recent years and can only be expected to worsen as COP29 approaches. Human rights groups estimate that more than 300 political prisoners, including 23 journalists, are currently being held in detention. Among those recently detained is high-profile pro-democracy activist Anar Mammadli. Mammadli was a co-initiator of the COP29 Climate of Justice initiative, which sought to use the conference as a platform to draw attention to the country’s environmental and human rights problems.
While calling for peace, Azerbaijan is waging war on the very few independent voices left in the country and creating a climate of fear for activists from across the region, where other countries are also imposing growing restrictions. Azerbaijanis who speak out during COP29 could face arrest after the international community leaves. Human Rights Watch has found that the hosting agreement between the conference and Azerbaijan contains a provision stating a duty to respect Azerbaijan’s laws and regulations and a duty “not to interfere in its internal affairs,” paving the way for anyone who brings up Nagorno-Karabakh or Azerbaijan’s human rights record to be prosecuted.
It seems possible to set aside Azerbaijan’s “internal affairs” for the greater good of furthering global climate goals—after all, the country was selected to host by consensus of all the region’s countries, including Armenia. Azerbaijan’s foreign policy chief certainly thinks so—he has stated that ‘overburdening the COP agenda with issues not having direct and immediate linkage to climate change is not helpful but detrimental’. But preventing the people calling for urgent action and more ambitious climate agreements from participating is closing the door to progress.
The only hope of climate action that meets the scale of the crisis is by opening the doors to civil society. Civil society has consistently sounded the alarm and raised public awareness of the need for climate action. It’s the key source of practical solutions, defends communities against environmentally destructive impacts, resists extraction and promotes sustainability.
NGOs, opposition movements, and activists can no longer be relegated to the sidelines of decision making by authoritarian leaders.
Future COPs should be held in countries with a civic space that allows strong domestic mobilization, and summit hosts should be expected to abide by high standards when it comes to domestic and international access and participation. That should be part of the deal hosts make in return for the global prestige that comes with hosting high-level events. Greenwashing climate destruction, peace-washing ethnic cleansing, and the UN blue-washing a culture of corruption and impunity can’t be the future of COPs.
Tara Petrović leads research on Europe and Central Asia for the CIVICUS Monitor. She is a human rights lawyer and civil society activist based in Belgrade, Serbia.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.