Rep. Smith Decries Biden Admin Praise for Azerbaijan in Run-Up to Climate Summit

“It is outrageous that the Biden-Harris administration is giving credence to Azerbaijan’s propaganda that it is a ‘peacemaker’ and sending a delegation to its COP29 conference while Azerbaijani dissidents in the United States and around the world are being persecuted and even killed for standing up for human rights and democracy,” said Smith, a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee and co-chair of the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. “The Biden-Harris administration needs to directly address the horrific and heightening transnational repression before it’s too late.”

The United Nations chose oil-rich Azerbaijan to host the COP29 Climate Change Conference, slated to take place Nov. 11-22.

The decision ended a months-long standoff in which Russia exerted veto power over nations critical of its invasion of Ukraine. The COP29 is the next meeting of the 198 countries, including the United States, that have signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the U.N. process for negotiating an agreement to limit climate change, first convened in 1994.

On Sept. 29, Azerbaijani dissident Vidadi Isgandarli was beaten and stabbed in his house in Mulhouse, France, and died of his injuries in a hospital two days later. The brutal crime – French police said he was stabbed more than 20 times – is the second such attack on French soil against an exiled critic of Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. In March 2021, Mahammad Mirzali, an Azerbaijani blogger and opposition figure, was the victim of a knife attack in Nantes, France, but survived.   

French authorities launched an investigation which led to the arrest of six suspects; however, the mastermind behind the attack has not been named. The French government has since provided Mirzali with a security team.

These goal of these attacks, say human rights watchers, is to instill the fear in other critics of the regime’s human rights violations and corruption – some of whom live in the United States – that they could also be hunted down and killed. Human rights groups have documented large-scale corruption and political repression over Aliyev’s 21 years in power.

Yet roughly one week after Isgandarli’s murder, John Podesta, who serves as President Biden’s senior adviser on clean energy innovation and implementation, said the U.S. and Azerbaijan had “aligned our priorities” since Aliyev agreed to host the climate change conference a year ago. Podesta made the remarks on Oct. 11 during a trip to Baku, noting that he met with Aliyev to discuss several issues, including preparations for the COP29 summit and ongoing efforts to encourage Azerbaijan to reach a durable peace agreement with Armenia.

“The U.S. values Azerbaijan’s leadership. President Ilham Aliyev has appointed a strong team led by Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources Mukhtar Babayev and Deputy Foreign Minister Yalchin Rafiyev,” Podesta said, according to a report by the Trend News Agency, an Azerbaijani news agency that focuses on current affairs in the Caucasus region and Central Asia. “We have aligned our priorities since Azerbaijan agreed to host COP29 just under a year ago.”

Azerbaijan and Armenia have been negotiating a peace agreement to end their decades-long conflict, with the goal of finalizing it before Baku hosts the global climate conference. Negotiations have been tense, especially after Azerbaijan last year engaged in a brief but deadly military offensive and successfully seized the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh. The military action prompted the exodus of 100,000 ethnic and predominantly Christian Armenians.

The United Nations chose Azerbaijan as the host of the COP29 last December, just months after it seized Nagorno-Karabakh. It’s the third major oil and gas producer in a row to host the annual U.N. negotiations on efforts to reduce global warming. Last year, United Arab Emirates, the world’s seventh-largest oil producer, hosted the conference. In 2022, it was held in Egypt, which is not in the world’s top tier of oil producers but still ranks as one of Africa’s top producers.

Smith and other human rights advocates argue that Podesta is buying into Azerbaijan’s propaganda that it is a “peacemaker” by sending a U.S. delegation to the COP29 conference. Smith pressed Podesta to retract his “destructive” statements about valuing Aliyev’s leadership and “foolishly stating” that the U.S. and Azerbaijan have “aligned our priorities.”

Amnesty International, a leading international human rights organization, said the killing of Isgandarli, a vocal critic of Aliyev, reveals a continued failure to protect exiled activists.

“The violent death of Vidadi Isgandarli must be effectively and promptly investigated,” Natalia Nozadze, Amnesty International’s researcher for the South Caucasus, said in a statement. “We call on the French authorities to consider all possible motives for his killing, including his criticism of the Azeri president and government, which was the reason for his exile. This heinous crime must be addressed urgently, and all those suspected of criminal responsibility are brought to justice in fair trials.”