By Sonya Dymova
Pressure by activists to change the location of the COP29 is mounting as the United Nations climate summit is set to take place in Azerbaijan in November. Among the activists’ concerns are the inability of Armenians to attend, participants’ safety, as well as COP29’s potential to greenwash – and sponsor – dictatorship and genocide.
It is not the first time COP will be hosted by a country accused of systemic human rights violations. The summit took place in Egypt in 2022 and in the United Arab Emirates in 2023. But, according to Russian Armenian activist Arshak Makichyan, the UN’s willingness to work with a country responsible for the September 2023 ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh Armenians is unprecedented.
“The United Arab Emirates is a dictatorship, but they didn’t commit genocide last year. In Egypt, they didn’t commit a genocide last year,” Makichyan, who weekly protested against climate change for over two years and whose family was stripped of Russian citizenship because of his activism, said. “It’s really strange that the UN is allowing Azerbaijan to greenwash a genocide.”
It is not the first time Azerbaijan has attempted to use environmentalism to legitimize its land grabs and forced displacement of Armenians. In 2021, Baku established a so-called “Green Energy Zone” that includes not only Nagorno-Karabakh, where the 2023 ethnic cleansing took place but also Nakhichevan, another territory that once had a significant Armenian population.
Some also fear that the summit will not only be used to greenwash Azerbaijan’s actions in the region but also to push for more oil contracts, raising funds for Baku’s military aggression against Armenia. The UAE – 2023’s COP host – reportedly used the event to significantly expand its state oil company’s revenues, according to an investigation conducted by the Global Witness NGO.
“Global Witness says that the UAE made 100 billion worth of transactions off the back of COP,” notes Tatiana Der Avedissian, head of business development for Economist Impact’s World Ocean Initiative. “I think Azerbaijan will be able to do the same thing, [although] probably not at the same scale.”
Azerbaijan’s lack of transparency prevents access to detailed allocations of non-renewable energy revenues. However, it is possible to see that the growth of military expenditures over the past 20 years often coincided with increased budget revenues from the State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan (SOFAZ).
Armenian activists cannot attend
Explicitly, people who visited Nagorno-Karabakh after 1991 “without an official permission” from Baku are barred from entering Azerbaijan. But the country’s vaguely formulated Migration Code — which cites eight reasons why a person can be denied initial entry, including “when the stay of a person … is considered undesirable” — effectively means that any person with Armenian heritage cannot enter the country, regardless of citizenship.
“If you have an Armenian name, you can’t get into the country,” Der Avedissian told CivilNet. “So most people, I think, aren’t even going to try.”
Armenia can send an official delegation to participate in COP29. According to Hikmet Hajiyev, a foreign policy adviser to Azerbaijan’s president, Baku has officially invited Armenia to the climate summit. Yerevan has not publicly commented on whether it will participate. But even if the government sends a delegation, Armenians won’t be able to voice their concerns freely, activists say.
“The Armenian government cannot really raise issues like the genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh because they’re afraid that Azerbaijan will start a war against Armenia,” Makichyan said, adding he will attempt to attend COP despite the entry ban. “It’s really important for Armenian civil society at least to try and raise these questions during the conference.”
COP in Baku is not risk-free for non-Armenians
Entering Azerbaijan might prove challenging to some non-Armenian participants, too: this June, Baku denied entry to at least three journalists from the UK and France.
While there is no publicly available evidence of COP29 attendees being surveilled, Azerbaijan has previously used Pegasus – spyware that can access messages, emails, calls, passwords, and visited locations – to track human rights activists and journalists, including one undisclosed UN representative.
In addition, the country has a history of detaining foreigners who back Armenia. French national Martin Ryan was arrested in Baku in December 2023 amid expanding military cooperation between Paris and Yerevan.
Baku’s retaliation extends beyond its borders. Council of Europe’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights cites three separate attempts on the life of exiled opposition activist Mahammad Mirzali. All three incidents happened in France in what the Committee says might be a case of “transnational repression.”
Activists push for location change
US-based grassroots activist Armenian Organised Resistance Coalition (ARMOR) recently launched a campaign demanding the summit organizers change location. Using public records, the group is reaching out to all COP29 attendees, raising awareness of Azerbaijan’s human rights violations, greenwashing of ethnic cleansing of Armenians, and reliance on fossil fuel investments. The campaign encourages the summit’s participants to sign their names on a letter demanding the UNFCCC — the UN body organizing the summit — change the venue. Over 6,000 non-attendees sent letters asking for an alternate COP location, too.
The location of COP has been altered before. In 2019, the summit’s venue was changed from Santiago, Chile, to Madrid, Spain, just weeks before the event was set to begin – due to the initial host country’s civil unrest.
The CivilNet request to the UNFCCC for comment on whether it will consider the letters has not been answered.
