The A to Z of Azerbaijan, Daily Brief October 8, 2024

Many may not be able to point to Azerbaijan on a map, but it’s about to take center stage globally.

The Caspian Sea country of some ten million people wedged between Iran and Russia will host COP29, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, in mid-November. So, it’s worth everyone learning a bit about it.

First, Azerbaijan is a petrostate, a country where the oil and gas industry provides most of the government’s revenue. Yes, a petrostate is hosting the global conference on climate change. It’s a bit of a trend, unfortunately – the United Arab Emirates was last year’s host.

Second, Azerbaijan is an authoritarian state, or what some experts prefer to call a “consolidated authoritarian regime,” where power is extremely concentrated in few hands.

For more than three decades – almost since the country became independent of the Soviet empire, in fact – Azerbaijan has been ruled by two presidents. First, there was Heydar Aliyev, from 1993 to 2003, and since then, the country has been ruled by his son, Ilham Aliyev.

Third, Azerbaijan is deeply repressive. Freedom of expression and association are severely curtailed. Journalists who try to say anything out of line get jailed. Public protests are swiftly and often brutally dispersed.

The government also enforces highly restrictive laws regulating nongovernmental organizations to limit their ability to register, access funding, or operate legally. Unregistered groups that continue their work do so on the margins of the law, at great personal risk.

Authorities are particularly nasty in Azerbaijan with their politically motivated repression. They often use bogus criminal charges to prosecute and imprison civic activists, journalists, and human rights defenders. They’ll wrongly accuse them of financial fraud or fabricate drug charges. Ugly stuff.

In recent months, in the run-up to the COP29 climate conference, the crackdown has escalated.

A new report documents the government’s concerted efforts to decimate civil society and silence its critics: dozens of fresh arrests on bogus criminal charges, prosecutions, detentions, and harassment.

As my expert colleague, Giorgi Gogia, says, the government’s “contempt for civic freedoms is putting independent groups and critical media on the path of extinction.”

So, with the global climate conference underway next month, these points are the bare minimum of what the world should know about the COP29 host, Azerbaijan.