Human Rights | Azerbaijan is accused of suppressing the media and civil society under the UN climate conference

Autocratic A diplomatic victory fell to the oil country of Azerbaijan when it won the next major UN climate conference, COP29, to be held in November.

Nearly 200 representatives of the country’s government and dozens of heads of state are expected at the two-week meeting.

Now the country will also get to see the dark sides of the meeting’s attention, when its poor human rights situation comes under the magnifying glass, write, among others, a US newspaper Politico and a British magazine The Guardian.

Most recently, criticism surfaced on Friday in Bonn, Germany, where a preparatory meeting for COP29 was organized. Activists arrived on the scene demanding the release of 23 Armenian political prisoners held by Azerbaijan.

Holding pictures of arrested people, the protesters criticized the fact that Azerbaijan and other countries that commit human rights violations are allowed to host large-scale international events such as the UN climate meetings.

Human rights organizations as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have throughout the spring accused Azerbaijan of suppressing the media and civil society during the UN climate conference.

“Azerbaijani authorities must immediately end their campaign of intimidation against civil society and the cynical arrest of their critics ahead of the COP29 climate summit in Baku in November,” Amnesty International’s South Caucasus researcher Natalia Nozadze appealed in April.

Human Rights Watch said he doubted itthat the director of the election monitoring organization Anar Mammadlin the April arrest was revenge for his election observation and human rights work, and at the same time the government’s latest attempt to eradicate critical voices before the climate conference.

In March Amnesty said also about the intimidation campaign against Azerbaijan’s independent media.

The human rights organization Human Rights Watch, on the other hand, says that it has observed at least 25 cases in which journalists and activists have been arrested or sentenced to prison in the past year.

Azerbaijani according to independent media the number of political prisoners in the country rose by dozens during the spring to 288 prisoners.

Human Rights Watch insists that, in the future, human rights issues should prevail in the selection of hosts for major international events, such as climate conferences.

Azerbaijan is not only an authoritarian state, but also one of the most corrupt countries in the world.

The president leading the country Ilham Aliyev was elected in February with more than 92 percent of the vote for a fifth term in the elections which The OSCE blamed lack of political competition.

In Transparency International’s last year’s corruption barometer of 180 countries, Azerbaijan ranked 154th. In the same comparison, its neighboring country Russia ranked 141st and Finland ranked 2nd.

Last September, Azerbaijan regained power with a lightning attack the separatist Nagorno-Karabakh that belongs to it, over which it has long argued with its neighbor Armenia. The attack drove 100,000 mostly ethnic Armenian residents from their homes.

On Friday, Armenia accused Azerbaijan of an Armenian politician it arrested in Karabakh by Ruben Vardanyan of torture in custody, Reuters reports.