As the European Parliament prepares to discuss on Tuesday the relations between Yerevan and Baku, as well as the human rights situation in Azerbaijan, a Swedish rights advocate has called out Baku’s abhorrent record, saying the government of Azerbaijan is concealing the real reasons behind Armenia’s support for Baku’s bid to host the United Nations Climate Summit, the COP29.
The European Parliament announced that the debate, scheduled for Tuesday, will focus on relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan, citing Armenian President Vahagn Khachatryan’s recent announcement that the signing of a peace agreement could take place before the COP29.
“Armenia and Azerbaijan are mired in a long-running conflict that escalated last year when Baku launched a military assault and seized the Nagorno-Karabakh region, leading to the exodus of some 100,000 Armenians. MEPs, therefore, strongly condemned the unjustified military attack as a blatant violation of international law and called on the EU to review its relations with Azerbaijan, including in the field of energy,” said the European Parliament statement on the scheduled discussion.
Swedish genocide expert Svante LundgrenSvante Lundgren, a genocide researcher and a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Middle East Studies at Lund University in Sweden, wrote in an article published in Altinget that Azerbaijan, which currently has the worst human rights record, should not be hosting the COP29, which is scheduled to take place next month in Baku.
“Azerbaijan is now considered the most authoritarian country in Europe, worse than Russia and Belarus. In Freedom House’s latest global freedom ranking, the country scored 7 out of 100, one point higher than Taliban-led Afghanistan. Azerbaijan ranks 164th out of 180 countries in the latest global press freedom ranking by Reporters Without Borders. In recent years, we have seen increasing repression of independent journalists and oppositionists in Azerbaijan,” Lundgren wrote in his article.
“Azerbaijan’s ambassador to Stockholm, Zaur Ahmadov, uses the upcoming climate meeting in Baku to praise his country’s commitment to peace and efforts to combat climate change. He says Armenia supported Azerbaijan’s bid to host the meeting without naming the conditions. But Armenia did so in order to free 32 prisoners of war held despite the ceasefire agreement providing for their release. Using prisoners of war as a commodity is clearly against international law,” the Swedish rights expert said.
“The European Parliament has demanded that member states impose sanctions against Azerbaijan over the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and the treatment of internal dissidents,” Lundgren said. “In January this year, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe decided to deprive Azerbaijan of its voting rights in the assembly for this year as the country has failed to fulfill its membership obligations.”
“No pretty words can hide the fact that this year’s main climate summit is being organized in a country with obvious shortcomings in terms of democracy and human rights. They are disappearing not because of ‘greenwashing’ and fashionable talk about peace and climate, but because of measures that are now conspicuously absent,” the Swedish expert pointed out.