The protester had only been shouting for a few seconds before he was grabbed by a man in black and dragged to the ground. Determined, he got back up and continued.
If you paid enough attention at COP29, you could see these black-suited men carefully patrolling the corridors of Baku’s Olympic Stadium. Like me, many activists covering the United Nations’ flagship environment conference in Azerbaijan, believed them to be state security services. The altercation happened in COP’s “Blue Zone”, which is under the authority of the United Nations and used for networking, private meetings, side events and press conferences of accredited participants.
Shouting at the top of his lungs, the protester criticised untenable working conditions and low pay for service workers at COP29. A crowd quickly gathered, phones and cameras in the air, filming the tussle. From behind their screens, many journalists urged the man in black to let go of the protester, and demanded to see this shadowy figure’s identification. The man in black refused and pushed his way through the cameras to rejoin a group of men talking into earpieces. The protester, who later identified himself as Ismail Jafarsoy, was eventually escorted out by UN security. His fate now that COP has finished is uncertain.
The incident confirmed the uneasy mood of the UN’s flagship climate conference. In Azerbaijan, speaking out of turn, whether on environmental or labour issues, is frowned upon at best and met with jail time for some.
Azerbaijani economist Gubad Ibadoghlu, a professor at the London School of Economics, was detained on 23 July 2023 on fabricated charges during a visit to the country to see his family. He is currently in the Kurdakhani detention centre and Amnesty International has raised concerns over his deteriorating health since his arrest.
In April this year, human rights and climate activist Anar Mammadli was arrested by the Azerbaijani authorities on bogus charges of conspiracy to unlawfully bring money into the country. Critics of the government say he was arrested for setting up the Climate of Justice Initiative in February, which used Azerbaijan’s hosting of COP to draw attention to the climate crisis. Mammadli faces eight years in jail.
Civil society groups and youth activists arriving at COP were given extensive security briefings. Those who attended these briefings told me that they lasted about an hour and they had to put their phones in another room and on airplane mode. They were told that their phones could be listening to them, and that they should never utter the word “Azerbaijan” or the name of its president Ilham Aliyev within the venue. Activists became used to having photos of them or their phone screens taken by people in the venue for no legitimate reason. Unsettled by this, they started to take photos of these surreptitious photographers in return, circulating them within their group chats like “wanted” posters.
The atmosphere created self-censorship among activists, who feared endangering their colleagues and friends if they spoke out against the Azerbaijani government. Despite the blatant abuses of power on behalf of the COP presidency, such as withholding key drafts during the negotiation process, activists preferred to target the Global North instead, for their equally dangerous lack of ambition in climate finance negotiation. But Azerbaijan meanwhile, was to be kept off lips.
One of the best publicity stunts at COP, hosted by a coalition of climate organisations, is “fossil of the day”, a satirical prize which rewards countries who are the best at doing the least on climate change, and who generally block or hinder negotiations. Azerbaijan was a clear contender and yet, the prize’s judges told me, their nomination was withheld until the very last day in fear of retaliation.
In the busy corridors of COP, I met Javid Gara, one of the few Azerbaijani activists present at the conference. We sat by one of the many pre-approved protests going on until Gara pointed at some men in black and said “let’s move”.
Gara is a climate activist from Azerbaijan, based in the UK. He campaigns against deforestation in the country, which lost 447 hectares of natural forest in 2023. Javid talked about the suspicion and paranoia in his homeland, where the crackdown on journalists drastically intensified after Azerbaijan was announced as the host of COP29. He told me that the regime has since become unpredictable, arresting people you would never expect. “We’ve got to the point where people are suspicious if you haven’t been arrested,” he said.
Azerbaijani President Aliyev has two weapons: activists, journalists and politicians are either arbitrarily arrested on trumped-up charges of money laundering or drug trafficking, or are tied down with an oppressive and restrictive law that regulates non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
Under this law, organisations are unable to receive foreign funding, and instead have to rely on government funds which limit their activities. In response, NGOs must either risk operating independently under immense budgetary pressure, or are forced to adapt their activities away from political or human rights based activism and toward less “provocative” topics such as environmental or agricultural issues. Many have been forced to flee and live in exile.
Emin Huseynov is one of many Azerbaijani human rights activists living in exile. After almost a year of hiding in the Swiss embassy in Baku, Huseynov managed to escape to Switzerland aboard a diplomatic jet. Shortly after reaching Switzerland, where he now lives and is in the process of seeking political asylum, he was stripped of his Azerbaijani citizenship. In July 2023, the European Court of Human Rights found the Azerbaijani government in violation of his rights and ordered them to reinstate his citizenship. He remains stateless to this day.
Huseynov continues to raise awareness of the blatant abuses of Aliyev’s regime, and to highlight the persistent attempts to whitewash his government through international cultural and political events, such as the Eurovision song contest or COP29. For his Climate Observers Partnership campaign, Huseynov bought the domain name COP29.host and made a website highlighting the repression of Aliyev’s regime. Access to the website was soon blocked by the Azerbaijani authorities.
As Huseynov told me, if the world needs finance to save a dying planet, so too do activists for Azerbaijan’s dying civil society. According to him, the war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East have made it harder to find funding from abroad. Both exiled and domestic activists are finding themselves financially forced out of their advocacy. “We have funds to keep us going until the end of November, after that, I don’t know what will happen,” he said.
In the halls of the Baku Olympic stadium, Javid Gara explained how he is determined to keep fighting for his country’s biodiversity despite the restrictions he faces. Refusing to risk government control, Gara’s organisation Ecofront has no funds, no offices, and no staff. “Our operational capacities are so restricted, we don’t have a choice, we have to stay voluntary,” he said.
Today, there are 319 political prisoners in Azerbaijan. Activists both inside and outside of the country are exposed to surveillance, intimidation, imprisonment and even assassination. In the weeks preceding COP29, a political opponent of the regime, Vidadi Isgandarli, was stabbed to death in his home in France. He was believed to be the fourth Azerbaijani activist in exile to have been murdered since 2021, according to Le Monde. Countries with such abhorrent human rights records should not be the hosts of climate conferences when so much is at stake.
Whether it be through the song and dance of Eurovision or the tense COP29 negotiations, Aliyev’s regime is desperate to cover up its abuses in glam and glitter. But attention should bring accountability, and the international community must make sure that while the president basks in the spotlight, he does not extend his dangerous grip in the shadows.
