By Paul Vartan Sookiasian
With one month to go until COP29, the annual United Nations global climate summit, host country Azerbaijan looks forward to enjoying the global spotlight as the world comes to Baku to discuss one of the most pressing matters of our time. But Azerbaijan’s hopes of reaping positive press as a host might not be coming to fruition.
Recent international press has begun to focus on Azerbaijan’s attempt to “greenwash” its reputation by trying to appear a good steward of the environment to distract from its record of human rights abuses. Also emerging is the notion of “peacewashing”, by which an autocratic regime is attempting to portray itself as a force for peace in the world, belying its recent wars of aggression and ethnic cleansing.
This week, the Washington Post editorial board critiqued the selection process for COP host, saying the criteria does not consider “democracy or human rights — or, apparently, whether blessing a particular regime with the privilege will embarrass the organization and the climate diplomats it assembles.”
As an autocratic petrostate, Azerbaijan ticks two boxes which on their own many would find disqualifying enough for the host of such a prestigious gathering on environmental rights. This is accentuated by the fact it is not an outlier but part of a wider trend, as last year’s host the United Arab Emirates is also a repressive petrostate, and the one before that Egypt is similarly dictatorial.
Azerbaijan has also caused consternation by already undermining a signature agreement of last year’s COP28, that there will be a swift transition away from the “fossil fuel era.” After being awarded hosting rights, President Ilham Aliyev retorted that fossil fuels are a “gift from God” to Azerbaijan which nobody has the right to criticize.
The famed French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo lampooned Aliyev and his hosting of COP29, saying “what better way to talk about climate change than in a state that is massively dependent on hydrocarbons? And then, let’s be crazy, as a bonus let’s do it there too, as a bonus, where environmental activists are being repressed.”
It forecasted that COP29 will be taking place in a “climate of fear and dread.”
Cited in many of these articles is a report released last week by United States-based NGOs Human Rights Watch and Freedom Now about the ongoing crackdown in Azerbaijan against any remaining semblance of criticism of the regime and independent peace advocates. It details the arrests of journalists from investigative news outlets such as Abzas Media, of human rights advocates like Bakhtiyar Hajiyev, of academics like Gubad Ibadoghlu and Bahruz Samadov, and even of environmental activists such as Anar Mammadli.
A piece this month from the U.S.-based National Public Radio brought attention to Mammadli’s case, who was attempting to organize civil society around climate issues ahead of COP29 before he was arrested in April. He previously served two and a half years in prison for his election monitoring work according to the European Court of Human Rights.
The DC-based NGO Freedom House issued its own report on the repression of activists and pushed for the international community’s obligation to “hold the Azerbaijani regime accountable for its human rights violations- and to push for change” ahead of COP29.
The Washington Post piece also refers to a letter sent by 60 members of the U.S. Congress earlier this month to Secretary of State Antony Blinken requesting he press for the release of all political prisoners, hostages, and POWs held by Azerbaijan, including ethnic Armenians. Azerbaijani president Ilham Aliyev dismissed the letter as “disgusting,” yet the Post retorted that “the concerns outlined by the lawmakers are very real. Azerbaijan’s sordid record of human rights violations is backed up by extensive evidence.”
Experts question the usefulness of an environmental conference organized by a government that locks up its own activists and refuses to allow the subject to be discussed openly. Many articles also point to the case of the village of Soydulu, where a rare public protest by residents against the construction of a toxic tailing dam for mining runoff was met with disproportionate use of force against peaceful village residents.
Azerbaijan has been assisted in its messaging by the consulting firm Teneo, which received a $4.7 million contract to assist with Baku for what it called narrative and initial content development around COP29. A hallmark of this ‘narrative development’ has been the “COP Truce,” a call by Azerbaijan for the cessation of wars around the world for the two-week period of COP, similar to the Olympic truce.
Paul Polman, a former chief of the British consumer goods conglomerate Unilever and now a climate activist and peace campaigner, told The Guardian that, “the idea of a ‘Cop truce’ is a deeply cynical PR stunt by Azerbaijan designed to distract the world’s attention away from its ethnic cleansing of Nagorno-Karabakh last year.”
Azerbaijan’s chief negotiator for COP Yalchin Rafiyev rejected the accusation.
“This initiative does not have any linkage with Armenia. What we are seeking is completely generic in nature. We are simply calling for a truce; it is not linked to political issues,” he said.
Despite Rafiyev’s claim, in recent days Azerbaijan instructed its army to remain on “high alert” for possible engagement with Armenian forces, while reiterating its demand for an end to the European Union’s border monitoring mission observing the ceasefire from within Armenia. Azerbaijan has received numerous shipments of military cargo from an Israeli base this year, as was seen in the past just prior to attacks by Azerbaijan on Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh.
Just this week, Azerbaijan’s military budget for 2025 was significantly increased to nearly $5 billion at President Aliyev’s request as a response to Armenia’s attempts to rebuild its own military after the devastating 2020 war.
According to Nick Cleveland-Stout, Junior Research Fellow at the DC-based Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, Teneo is assisting in this “peacewashing” by widely distributing the message to anyone who will listen. Per its Foreign Agents Registration Act filing from earlier this summer, Teneo had already contacted nearly 150 journalists on 500 separate occasions, and treated a few to dinner on visits to the cities of Baku and Shushi, after which some of them published favorable articles on Azerbaijan’s hosting of COP29.
Meanwhile, after speaking directly to a senior official within the Aliyev regime about the pre-COP crackdown on dissidents and the accusations of hypocrisy, POLITICO summarized the government’s messaging as “don’t bring your human rights concerns to Azerbaijan for COP29.”
Azerbaijani foreign policy chief Hikmet Hajiyev attributed the bad press as “coordinated smear campaign and dirty propaganda… we perceive it as hostile acts against Azerbaijan.”
Other Azerbaijani figures have made similar comments on social media to explain away the COP criticism, attributing it to a global Armenian conspiracy to defame Azerbaijan. An anonymous senior Armenian diplomat told POLITICO that if Azerbaijan is serious about this being a COP of peace, “it should reciprocate Armenia’s proposal to sign the peace agreement [and] release all Armenian hostages… We are of an opinion that our partners have leverage in encouraging Azerbaijan to do so.”
A Financial Times’ editorial noted that while “allowing countries such as Azerbaijan to host global events can in theory shine a spotlight that forces autocrats to behave better… Aliyev, who won a stage-managed fifth election victory in February, seems unfazed.”
Accordingly, it urges international governments and attendees to go beyond those hopes of better behavior to actually pressing Azerbaijan on its democratic record and to ensure rights are respected during the conference. It also indicated “reforms are badly needed to tighten the process of awarding COPs — and the obligations of the hosts.”
Given Azerbaijan’s refusal to change its behavior so far ahead of COP, it remains to be seen how or if the international community will hold Azerbaijan accountable and protect the rights of all attendees.
Of particular concern is the ability of journalists to attend and freely report on COP29 given the complete lack of journalistic freedom. Perhaps a sign of things to come, three investigative journalists from the UK and France who were accredited to attend the Baku Energy Forum this June in Baku were blocked from entering the conference when they arrived. The journalists said they felt unsafe as they were confronted by the event’s organizers, describing the encounter as “frightening and intimidating.”
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