No pretty words can hide the fact that this year's main climate summit is being organized in a country with obvious shortcomings in terms of democracy and human rights. Svante Lundgren, a genocide researcher and a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Middle East Studies at Lund University (Sweden), wrote about this in his article in “Altinget”, according to Dialogorg.ru.

“Azerbaijan is now considered the most authoritarian country in Europe, worse than Russia and Belarus. In Freedom House's latest global freedom ranking, the country scored 7 out of 100, one point higher than Taliban-led Afghanistan. Azerbaijan ranks 164th out of 180 countries in the latest global press freedom ranking by Reporters Without Borders. In recent years, we have seen increasing repression of independent journalists and oppositionists in Azerbaijan.

Azerbaijan's ambassador to Stockholm, Zaur Ahmadov, uses the upcoming climate meeting in Baku to praise his country's commitment to peace and efforts to combat climate change. He says Armenia supported Azerbaijan's bid to host the meeting without naming the conditions. But Armenia did so in order to free 32 prisoners of war held despite the ceasefire agreement providing for their release. Using prisoners of war as a commodity is clearly against international law.

The European Parliament has demanded that member states impose sanctions against Azerbaijan over the ethnic cleansing of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2023 and the treatment of internal dissidents.

In January this year, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe decided to deprive Azerbaijan of its voting rights in the assembly for this year as the country has failed to fulfill its membership obligations.

No pretty words can hide the fact that this year's main climate summit is being organized in a country with obvious shortcomings in terms of democracy and human rights. They are disappearing not because of 'greenwashing' and fashionable talk about peace and climate, but because of measures that are now conspicuously absent,” the Swedish expert said.