A Year After Ethnic Cleansing, the World Comes to Azerbaijan | Opinion

Sept. 19 marks the one-year anniversary of Azerbaijan’s attack on Nagorno-Karabakh, which led to the expulsion of its 120,000 ethnic Armenians. So this is a good week to contemplate how it could possibly be that the world community decided shortly thereafter to allow Azerbaijan to host the COP29 global climate conference—and how to handle it.
As the world grapples with the urgent need to combat climate change, this travesty sent a disturbing message about our willingness to normalize horrendous behavior for little if any benefit. It’s too late to change the venue—as the conference is in mid-November—but there’s a way to make the best of it.
Azerbaijan, like Dubai, the host of last year’s conference, is a nation heavily reliant on oil and gas revenues; the previous year’s host, Egypt, is also a country with a significant energy sector—and the precedent argument has been a major pillar of the defense of the COP29 venue: The argument goes that petrostates cannot be ignored and must be encouraged to become part of the discussion.
However, Azerbaijan’s aggressive military actions over the past four years in the Nagorno-Karabakh region significantly contrast with the relatively peaceful stances of the United Arab Emirates and Egypt. This makes Azerbaijan an even less suitable host for a conference centered on sustainability and climate action—because there is a correlation between decency on the world stage and a genuine willingness to contribute and indeed sacrifice in the fight to save humanity from catastrophic global warming. The indecent in one sphere are not likely to be decent in the other.
Indeed, in this case the two converge. War is inherently destructive to both human life and the environment. The conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 not only led to tragic loss of life and mass displacement but has also precipitated significant environmental damage. The use of drones and white phosphorus—par for the course for a despotic regime indifferent to norms of warfare and human life—destroyed entire landscapes. The ultimate ethnic cleansing of the Armenian population of Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 followed a 10-month blockade that exhausted water reservoirs. And military activities contribute significantly to carbon emissions, a point of concern that should not be overlooked at a climate summit.
The conference, to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan’s capital, will discuss sustainable practices in a venue symbolizing conflict and environmental degradation.
Moreover, Azerbaijan is the most repressive country to have ever been chosen to host the climate conference. This is a place that not only has carried out aggression against Armenians and still threatens Armenia itself—it is cruelly despotic toward its own population, tolerating almost no dissent. Democracy watchdog groups like Freedom House rate it as one of the least free places in the entire world. It ranked 154th out of 180 countries in Transparency International’s 2023 Corruption Perceptions Index. The ruling elite, led by Azerbaijan’s strongman Ilham Aliyev, has been implicated in major corruption scandals, including the Pandora Papers, which revealed extensive offshore wealth linked to his family and close associates.
What does it mean for such a place to host a major global event? How dispiriting is it for democracy activists in Azerbaijan itself? The message, clearly, is that the international community is willing to overlook warmongering and ruthless suppression. This undermines the moral and ethical foundations of our environmental commitments.
Will we get anything, at least in exchange? Unlikely. In recent comments, Aliyev has doubled down on his country’s intentions to continue depending on fossil fuels. Calling his mineral wealth “a gift of the gods,” Aliyev said recently that “We largely are investing in increasing our gas production.”
The international community, especially that part dedicated to climate action, should be appalled. Attending the conference in Azerbaijan, given the current circumstances, would be perceived as a form of complicity in the aggression and environmental neglect perpetrated by the host country.
There is, however, a saving grace. The holding of the conference in so objectionable a venue offers the world community a small opportunity to cast light upon the host regime. It is a chance to call out the fact that Human Rights Watch found that over the past year, at least 25 journalists and activists have been arrested or sentenced in Azerbaijan, with most still in custody under trumped-up and illegitimate charges. Additionally, Western journalists were recently denied entry to an energy conference in Baku, raising serious concerns about Azerbaijan’s intentions to suppress independent reporting by outsiders during COP29 itself.
Standard notions of politesse should not prevent those who choose not to boycott the conference from calling out all these awful misbehaviors of the host.
They should insist that Azerbaijan commit itself to weaning the planet from fossil fuels, and more. They should demand the immediate release of all journalists currently detained in Azerbaijan, and indeed all political prisoners including ethnic Armenians seized last year. They should call for greater scrutiny of Azerbaijan’s role in the global climate dialogue, particularly given its reliance on fossil fuels and its repressive governance.
If COP is to remain a symbol of global unity against climate change, it must not only preach sustainability when and where it is comfortable to do so, but also in contexts such as the upcoming conference. The decision to host COP29 in Azerbaijan was moral misstep. We can and must demand better, and it starts with action on the ground, in Baku.
Sheila Paylan (@SheilaPaylan) is human rights lawyer and senior legal consultant with the United Nations. The views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the United Nations.
The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.