Four months before the COP29 conference in Azerbaijan, rights organizations have joined international officials calling for the respect of human and environmental rights defenders and journalists in the fossil fuel-producing country and those traveling to the annual gathering to be held in the capital, Baku, in November.
But where the former COP host countries Dubai and Egypt deployed tactics to silence critics, Azerbaijan appears to have gotten an early start in that process.
Emin Huseynov, a former journalist in Azerbaijan and co-founder of the Geneva-based Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety (IRFS), said he confronted Baku’s lead negotiator, Yalchin Rafiyev, at recent UN climate talks in Bonn.
He asked him: “How will it be possible, as you speak here, to host a meaningful and equal COP29 in Baku for everyone, when you have jailed your own civil society?”
Huseynov, who was forced to leave his country in 2015 after IRFS’s main office was raided and he was charged with abuse of power and tax evasion, was speaking at a side event at the Human Rights Council. His organization and others attending the event said Azerbaijan has intensified its crackdown on government critics, including environmental defenders, over the last year.
Now living in Switzerland, Huseynov said that Baku’s representative in Bonn responded by accusing groups like his of politicizing Baku’s COP hosting.
“This latest crackdown is not about some incidental issues, it’s a systematic crackdown, an annihilation program against Azerbaijani critical NGOs and media,” Samad Rahimli, a lawyer and founding board member of III Respulika Platformasi (Third Republic Platform), an exiled NGO focused on improving governance, said at another recent Council side event in Geneva.
Michel Forst, the UN special rapporteur on environmental defenders under the Aarhus Convention, recalled that as a party to the convention, Azerbaijan was obligated to protect the defenders.
“With the COP29 happening in Azerbaijan, there is the opportunity for new challenges and the need to work together with different actors including the head of COP to address what is happening and [for me] to learn from testimonies from civil society,” he said.
Forst, whose mandate includes monitoring human rights violations linked to the environment and providing recommendations to governments, attended COP28 in Dubai. “I was concerned about what I saw and the testimonies I heard,” he added.
COP29 welcome mat
In recent years, Azerbaijan’s gas exports to the European Union have increased significantly amid efforts to reduce the latter’s gas dependency on Russia since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But the ties to Azerbaijan have become an embarrassment to the EU in light of state repression.
Since late 2023, when Azerbaijan was nominated to host COP29, the government has stepped up efforts to stifle any dissent. At least 25 journalists have been detained, including six who attempted to cover a protest in June 2023 by villagers against the expansion of a nearby tailings pond by a gold mining company, Anglo Asian Mining. Locals suspect that the reservoir’s toxic material is contaminating water and soils, which the firm denies. Its Iranian-American chief executive is reputedly close to President Ilham Aliyev.
Ahead of an early snap presidential election in February this year, the number of reporters jailed or detained ticked up further in Azerbaijan. Civil society groups estimate that more than 300 political prisoners are being held. Some family members have been subjected to physical abuse while others have had their funds frozen.
The timing of the snap election came after Baku took full control of the Nagorno-Karabakh region in September, prompting more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee. The area had already been blockaded from receiving food and medicine.
Azerbaijan ranks among the lowest globally — 158 out of 180 — on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index, while Reporters Without Borders puts it at 167th out of 180, between Egypt and Bahrain.
In April, on his return to Azerbaijan after speaking at the Human Rights Council’s last session about the country’s rights violations, Anar Mammadli, a member of the COP29 Climate Justice Initiative, was jailed on trumped-up “smuggling” charges.
Yves Lador, a representative of the environmental NGO Earthjustice in Geneva, reflected on what that meant for activists ahead of COP29.
“Just a few weeks ago . . . we were working openly with [Mammadli] in the preparation of COP29. It is the first time that we directly see this hit at the heart of those working on preparing a COP. We see [it] went one step further,” Lador said at a side event.
Referring to Reporters’ Freedom and Safety, which organized the side event, a representative of the Azerbaijan government refuted the “baseless accusations by the corrupt NGO which uses the Human Rights Council to spread fake narratives and lies.” She said that Baku “continued to build dialogue and cooperation with local and international NGOs not just within COP29 but on other matters as well.”
A government-organized trip in April for foreign journalists planning to cover COP29 brought them to Nagorno-Karabakh, where the government showcased a program aimed at putting the region on a net-zero track. It included razing towns and transforming landscapes to source necessary minerals.
Hoping to achieve recognition
Some civil society groups say that the annual climate conference, which typically draws tens of thousands of participants from around the world, may help shed more light on rights activists in Azerbaijan.
Mohamed Lotfy, a co-founder of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, said that the detention of an Indian environmental activist, Ajit Rajagopal, in 2022, for attempting to walk from Cairo to Sharm El-Sheikh, where COP27 was being held, inspired NGOs in the country.
“There is good news in that hosting COP opened the eyes of the world on the situation of human rights in Egypt. . . . It allowed climate activists to connect with other groups for the first time in 11 years and was a good opportunity for NGOs to speak out,” he said.
The slogan “No climate justice without human rights,” which has since become a common call at international climate events, was created as a result, Lotfy added.
But he told Geneva Solutions that participation of Egyptian NGOs at the conference had been limited, as those who were accredited were “hand-picked” by authorities, who would not speak critically about human rights or climate change. “They will occupy space, burn oxygen in the air and fill gaps in official photos, and then the government will say, ‘We had 100 NGOs from Egypt participating: a record high number.'”
Lotfy said the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which convenes the COPs, was also to blame for not doing its own due diligence on how the Egyptian government allocates credentials. “They dealt with Egypt as if it was the UK or Germany,” which allow independent NGOs to be represented.
In the end, after meeting with Forst, Egyptian NGOs were able to attend COP27 with badges allocated to foreign NGOs under a “gentleman’s agreement” between the government and the UNFCCC, Lofty said.
Similar concerns now exist among civil society groups in Azerbaijan, where the Institute for Reporters’ Freedom and Safety says only a single NGO, IDEA, an environmental group run by Aliyev’s daughter, Leyla, has been admitted to the COP.
After Dubai, where an NGO was de-badged for holding a press conference on Palestine in the restricted conference area, where protest sites were more limited than usual, many rights groups remain distrustful of arrangements made between host countries and the UNFCCC. Activists are again calling for transparency of the bilateral agreement with Azerbaijan.
Alexander Saier, the media lead for UNFCCC, wrote to Geneva Solutions that the “host country agreements for the purpose of the organisation of meetings are subject to limited publication under the Limited Publications policy of the UN secretariat.”
Concern over press coverage in Baku is also on the rise after Western journalists were refused entry to an energy summit in June opened by President Aliyev.
Forst recalled that all 47 signatories to the Aarhus Convention “have an obligation to also promote and facilitate the participation of defenders in all COP meetings including the COP in Azerbaijan.”
This article was published courtesy of Geneva Solutions.
Geneva Solutions is an independent nonprofit news platform covering International Geneva.
