CIVICUS discusses the human rights situation in Azerbaijan as the country prepares to host the COP29 climate summit with Emin Huseynov, an Azerbaijani journalist and human rights activist in exile. Emin was forced to flee the country and stripped of his citizenship, and has been living in political exile since 2015. He’s the lead campaigner for the Climate Observers Partnership, a coalition of local and international civil society organisations (CSOs) raising awareness about the situation in Azerbaijan.
COP29, the latest conference on the United Nations (UN) Framework Convention on Climate Change, will take place in November in Azerbaijan, an authoritarian petrostate with closed civic space and close relations with Iran and Russia. The choice of host has raised concerns among CSOs, as a successful COP requires extensive domestic and international civil society participation.
