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Stand Up for Human Rights in Azerbaijan, at COP29 and Beyond
The rare international spotlight on Azerbaijan as it prepares to host COP29 represents a critical opportunity to mark strong concern about its crackdown on independent civil society.
Sep 13, 2024
The following is a statement released by a group of international organizations representing human rights and climate interests on September 11, 2024.
We, the undersigned civil society organizations, movements, groups, and individuals, highlight the urgent need to address serious human rights concerns in Azerbaijan in the lead-up to its hosting this year’s United Nations Climate Conference, or COP29, to be held in Baku from November 11 to 22, 2024.
Azerbaijan’s government has a longstanding and well-documented pattern of repressing independent civil society and silencing critical voices. Hosting an international gathering such as COP29 in this context raises grave concerns about the ability of civil society, including environmental activists, human rights defenders, and journalists, to participate freely and safely before, during, and after the conference.
Robust and rights-respecting climate action requires the full and meaningful participation of civil society in climate negotiations, including the key outcome documents of COP29.
The rare international spotlight on Azerbaijan as it prepares to host COP29 represents a critical opportunity to mark strong concern about its crackdown on independent civil society and press for an end to abuses.
Azerbaijani human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people are behind bars in the country on politically motivated charges. A new wave of detentions is currently under way, with dozens of activists and media figures arrested on baseless, serious criminal charges.
Among those targeted is Gubad Ibadoghlu, a well-known academic and anti-corruption expert who has specialized in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas industry. Dr. Ibadoghlu was violently arrested on July 23, 2023, and the authorities pressed bogus charges against him involving counterfeit money and distributing extremist religious materials. During his nine-month detention, his chronic health conditions deteriorated sharply as a result of the authorities’ refusal to provide him with adequate medical treatment. Dr. Ibadoghlu is currently under house arrest. If convicted, he could face up to 17 years in prison.
Another emblematic case is that of Anar Mammadli, a prominent human rights defender and a founding member of the recently formed Climate of Justice Initiative, a civil society undertaking that seeks to use COP29 to promote civic space and climate justice in Azerbaijan. Mammadli was arrested on April 29, 2024, amid Azerbaijan’s escalating crackdown on independent voices, and charged with spurious currency smuggling.
At least 18 journalists and other individuals affiliated with Abzas Media, Toplum TV, and Kanal 13, the last remaining independent outlets in Azerbaijan, are either behind bars or otherwise implicated in baseless criminal prosecutions. Just on August 21, authorities arrested Bahruz Samadov, a PhD candidate at Charles University in Prague and a regular contributor to numerous international and regional publications and media, while he was visiting Baku to spend time with his grandmother. Samadov is in pre-trial detention facing treason charges, widely believed to be related to his outspoken peace activism. On July 22, the authorities arrested another researcher, Igbal Abilov, also on spurious treason charges. He, too, remains in pretrial custody.
In his opening address to the United Nations Human Rights Council in June 2024, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk highlighted Azerbaijan for specific concern, “urg[ing] the authorities in Azerbaijan to review, in line with international human rights law, all cases of journalists, activists, and other individuals arbitrarily deprived of their liberty” and to immediately release them.
The government of Azerbaijan has to date refused to heed this and numerous, similar calls by its international partners.
Robust and rights-respecting climate action requires the full and meaningful participation of civil society in climate negotiations, including the key outcome documents of COP29. The dire human rights situation in Azerbaijan makes it incumbent on the U.N. Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat and member states to take concrete steps to ensure safe space for diverse civil society participation at COP29. They should ensure that the government of Azerbaijan does not inhibit individuals and groups critical of the government from participating in the conference and that the host government respects the rights of all participants to speak freely and to peacefully assemble inside and outside the conference venue.
This year’s climate conference is the third in a row to take place in an authoritarian country—following Egypt and United Arab Emirates as hosts of, respectively, COP27 and COP28. As highlighted by the U.N. and other independent experts, respect for freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association, and allowing critical voices and the free flow of information, are integral to effectively and meaningfully tackling the climate crisis, and should be a core requirement for hosting events such as COP.
The UNFCCC should set human rights criteria for future COP hosts, including an obligation to realize the rights to freedom of speech and assembly that are preconditions to ensure an ambitious COP outcome. In addition, for this and future climate COPs, the UNFCCC should make host country agreements—which set out arrangements between COP summit organizers and host country authorities—public and accessible in a timely manner, and ensure that they comply with international human rights law.
The UNFCCC and member states should also ensure that interests of the fossil fuel industry do not undermine the credibility and outcome of climate negotiation at COP29 and future COPs.
We urge UNFCCC and member states to press the Azerbaijani government to respect its human rights obligations, including by immediately and unconditionally releasing arbitrarily detained activists and human rights defenders. They should also call on Azerbaijani authorities to implement concrete, measurable, structural reforms, such as amending its laws regulating nongovernmental organizations and media, to ensure that positive changes endure beyond COP29, and put into place mechanisms for follow-up monitoring, to verify that progress is upheld and to enable effective and timely intervention in the event of any backsliding, especially in any cases of retaliation or backlash traceable to engagement in or around the climate talks.
We urge the government of Azerbaijan to uphold its commitments as a member of numerous multilateral organizations and initiatives that have human rights elements, and its obligations as a party to key international human rights treaties, by taking the following steps:
- Immediately and unconditionally release all human rights defenders, journalists, and civil society activists wrongfully held on politically motivated grounds, and drop the bogus charges against them;
- Cease the use of criminal prosecution as a tool to suppress government critics and members of civil society; and
- Lift undue restrictions on civil society by amending laws related to registration and funding of nongovernmental groups and media, bringing them into compliance with international standards and recommendations issued by the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission.
UNFCCC member states and Secretariat, and other key international actors and organizations, such as the European Union, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and the World Bank Group, as well as companies with business interests in Azerbaijan, should all stand in firm solidarity with Azerbaijan’s independent civil society.
Many civic actors, at great personal risk, continue to fight for human rights and climate justice in the country and the region. Azerbaijan’s international partners should put their weight behind the calls for specific steps made here, hold Azerbaijan accountable, and help ensure that the government takes them as a matter of urgent priority.
If you or your organization are interested in joining the statement, please complete this form.
Organizations:
Anar Mammadli Campaign to end repression in Azerbaijan
CEE Bankwatch Network
Center for American Progress
Climate Rights International
Committee to Protect Journalists
Crude Accountability
Endangered Scholars Worldwide
European Exchange European Platform for Democratic Elections (EPDE)
FIDH (International Federation for Human Rights), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
Freedom Now
Heinrich Böll Stiftung
Human Rights Foundation
Human Rights House Foundation
Human Rights Watch
International Partnership for Human Rights
Natural Resource Governance Institute
New University in Exile Consortium
Norwegian Helsinki Committee
Open Contracting Partnership
PEN America
PEN International
People in Need
Publish What You Pay
ReCommon
Reporters Without Borders (RSF)
World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), within the framework of the Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders
Individuals:
Corinna Gilfillan
Simon Taylor, Co-Founder & Director, Hawkmoth
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The Corporate Press Has Earned the Scorn of US Voters
In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.
Sep 08, 2024
The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.
Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.
Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”
Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”
These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.
They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Reviewnoted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.
In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.
In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”
While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs,” but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.
Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”
Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined "When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?" a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.
It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.
Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.
A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.
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What Does It Really Mean to Say Israel Has the Right to Defend Itself?
If Israel wants to be safe and secure, step one—Kamala, I’m certain you know this!—is to value Palestinians as fully human, talk to them, and listen.
Sep 07, 2024
“As I said then, I say today, Israel had a right—has a right to defend itself.”
This is militarism set in stone. The words are those of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, of course, in her extensive CNN interview last week—quick words that lead the charge and spew the glory, no matter how blatantly false they are.
Oh, and by the way: “Far too many innocent Palestinians have been killed.”
She had to add some vague, paradoxical empathy, apparently, just because the nation she hopes to lead—USA! USA!—is kind of growing up, at least a little bit, and a certain (inconvenient) segment of its voters now maintain skepticism about the effectiveness, not to mention the moral sanity, of militarism. Harris, alas, had no intention of addressing the issue with intelligence, nor does the media push her to: What, in fact, does self-defense mean? Does it always, unquestionably, require violence?
The violence in Palestine—in Gaza and also the West Bank—goes on and on, to what end? Nothing I write here is new, but what I want to do is push the matter beyond the realm of glorious, media-certified abstraction. Israel has the right to defend itself. What does that actually look like? Here’s a brief, recent example from the Drop Site:
For nearly a week, the Israeli military has been laying siege to hospitals in Jenin and other cities in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, severely restricting access to medical care, targeting medical workers and ambulances, and cutting off water and electricity, as part of a massive military offensive in the occupied West Bank, the largest operation in the Palestinian territory in over two decades.
...The move mirrors tactics by the Israeli military in Gaza, where every hospital has been targeted and only a fraction are partially functioning, leaving the healthcare system in ruins.
And the Palestine Red Crescent noted that “Israeli troops have ‘directly targeted’ ambulances, injuring two medical workers and a volunteer doctor. ‘Our teams have been prevented from transporting various casualties, patients, and elderly suffering from chronic diseases, and women in labor. The further marginalization of already vulnerable communities renders the area uninhabitable.’”
But Israel has the right to defend itself! Just imagine if the mainstream media refused to report on war—on “self-defense”—as an abstraction, especially when hospitals are being targeted, ambulances are being targeted, refugee camps are being bombed. Even if there’s a justification of some sort for any particular action, this is what self-defense looks like. Real journalism will not quietly look away from it.
Nor will it take events out of context for the purpose of creating a “good guy/bad guy” narrative. Maybe creating such a narrative is part of the game of politics, but honest journalism refuses to submit to it. For instance, as per the website Decolonize Palestine:
Framing is important. Being able to dictate the narrative, to be given the freedom to explain events in a way sympathetic to your worldview, can be an incredibly powerful tool. As many studies have shown, there has been an empirically proven bias toward the Zionist and Israeli narrative in U.S. media. This means that Israelis have had enormous advantages in framing what is happening in Palestine.
In other words, the Hamas attack of October 7 stands all by itself: a shocking act of barbaric violence perpetrated (for no reason except hatred) on innocent Israelis. But in fact, horrific as the act was, it happened within a context: seven decades of Israeli occupation, Gaza turned into an open-air concentration camp, Palestinians living without freedom and dignity.
Ignoring this is the equivalent, let us say, of a Hollywood-constructed brutal Indian attack on a wagon train of American settlers. The white guys are the victims! They have a right to defend themselves.
But this is just the starting point. Journalism is supposed to speak truth to power. This is easy to say, but truth is not necessarily simple—let alone simplistic.
Israel has the right to defend itself. Let me take a moment here to agree with would-be President Harris. Yes, Israel has the right to defend itself. But what does that actually mean? Self-defense is far, far more than an us-vs.-them standoff. If Israel wants to be safe and secure, step one—Kamala, I’m certain you know this!—is to value Palestinians as fully human, talk to them, and listen. And of course, this truth goes in all directions.
Anyone who isn’t aware of this is... deeply ignorant? Or do I simply mean part of both parties’ voting base? I listen to Harris triumphantly declare that the United States has the most lethal military force on the planet, followed by a resonating cheer from the voters, and it all sounds as phony as the worst movie script I can imagine. But apparently we remain trapped in our military budget.
As I wrote a few months ago: “We will not enter the future with closed minds. We will not find security—we will not evolve—if we choose to remain subservient to linear, us-vs.-them thinking. We will not become our fullest selves or have access to our own collective human consciousness if we choose to stay caged in our own righteous certainty.”
And yes, Israel has a right to defend itself. So does Palestine. So do all of us—we have the right to defend ourselves from our own militarism.
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