TBILISI, Georgia (AP) — Climate activist Greta Thunberg attended a rally in Georgia on Monday to protest Azerbaijan hosting the annual United Nations climate talks.
Thunberg and dozens of other activists who gathered in Tbilisi, the capital of the South Caucasus, argued that Azerbaijan does not deserve to host the climate talks because of its repressive policies.
The UN climate talks, called COP29, opened on Monday in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a major oil producer where the world’s first oil well was drilled.
Thunberg described Azerbaijan as “a repressive, occupying state that has committed ethnic cleansing and continues to crack down on Azerbaijani civil society. violations of rights.”
“We cannot give them any legitimacy in this situation. That is why we stand here and say no to greenwashing and no to the Azerbaijani regime,” she said.
Azerbaijan has committed to clean energy projects, but critics have argued this is just to export more oil and gas.
Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has been in power since 2003, when he succeeded his father who died after ruling the oil-rich country for the past decade. He has been accused by critics of intolerance of dissent and freedom of expression.
Earlier this year, Aliyev won another seven-year presidential term in elections that monitors from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe said took place in a “restrictive environment” without real political competition. Aliyev called the early vote as he enjoyed soaring popularity after Azerbaijani forces quickly retook the Karabakh region in September 2023 from ethnic Armenian separatists, who had controlled it for three decades.
After Azerbaijan regained full control over Karabakh, most of its 120,000 Armenian residents fled. However, Azerbaijani authorities said they were welcome to stay and promised their human rights would be guaranteed.
Thunberg, 21, has inspired a global youth movement demanding stronger efforts to fight climate change after organizing weekly protests outside the Swedish parliament from 2018.
The European climate agency Copernicus announced earlier this month that the world is on track for 1.5 degrees of warming this year, which is on track to be the hottest year in human civilization.
Speaking at the meeting in Tbilisi on Monday, Thunberg stressed that the hottest year on record comes after global greenhouse gas emissions hit a record high last year. Holding the climate change conference “in an authoritarian petrostate is beyond absurd,” she said.
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