In the months leading up to a high-profile global climate summit in November, the government of Azerbaijan has been intensely preparing for its role as host, renovating building facades, training volunteers and retrofitting a stadium for tens of thousands of delegates.
The energy-rich nation in the Caucasus Mountains region has engaged in more ominous activity as well: It has locked up dozens of activists and journalists in what experts describe as the country’s most aggressive campaign of repression in years.
The spate of arrests, which began last year, has surprised some observers who expected that Azerbaijan’s authoritarian ruler, President Ilham Aliyev, would feel international pressure to project an image of political openness before the summit, which is convened by the United Nations. Instead, human rights monitors and political analysts say, Mr. Aliyev appears intent on stamping out the last vestiges of independent civil society and free press in his country.
“We haven’t seen repression like this in the country in a long time,” said Stefan Meister, who studies Azerbaijan and other parts of the former Soviet Union for the German Council on Foreign Relations. Some of the arrests, he said, appeared to be an effort to “eliminate everything that could lead to criticism around COP,” as the climate change meeting, officially the Conference of the Parties, is known.
Those arrested have included at least 12 journalists for at least three prominent independent media outlets, human rights watchdogs say. They have also included well-known activists like Anar Mammadli, who was arrested weeks after he co-founded a group in February called the Climate Justice Initiative that aimed to use the climate summit to pressure the government to improve human rights and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr. Aliyev has dismissed international criticism of the arrests as a “smear campaign” intended to distract from “our noble mission to cope with the negative impacts of climate change.” The authorities have cited alleged financial crimes and violations of Azerbaijan’s stringent code for nongovernmental organizations as reasons for the arrests.
“Being a journalist and being a civil society representative doesn’t mean that somebody should be above the law,” Mr. Aliyev’s foreign policy adviser, Hikmet Hajiyev, said in a phone interview. “All actions that have been taken are taken with the framework of law.”
International human rights groups call the arrests politically motivated and the charges baseless. In a report last month documenting the arrests, Human Rights Watch urged countries that participate in the climate meeting in Baku, the capital, to “speak out vocally” about “the worsening environment for civil society.”
But the international response has been muted. In the Caucasus, the mountainous region where Europe and Asia meet, Mr. Aliyev has emerged as a dominant player after 21 years of rule. With modern weaponry funded by oil and gas revenues, his military defeated neighboring Armenia in 2020 and again last year in a long-running conflict.
At the same time, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have elevated Azerbaijan as a key partner for the West. The European Union sees Azerbaijan as an alternative to Russia as a source of fossil fuels, and it pledged after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to double imports of natural gas from Azerbaijan by 2027.
Azerbaijan is also a key partner for Israel, importing Israeli weaponry and selling Israel oil.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken has spoken to Mr. Aliyev at least five times this year, according to the State Department, hailing “a growing number of partnership initiatives” between the United States and Azerbaijan. A senior European diplomat, insisting on anonymity to speak candidly, said Mr. Aliyev’s recent crackdown stemmed from a calculation that, in Azerbaijan’s view, the West “needs us more than we need them.”
“We have our own role to contribute in the energy security of the European Union,” Mr. Hajiyev, the adviser to the Azerbaijani president, said. He condemned “the weaponization of human rights issues,” describing them as attempts “to push Azerbaijan into a corner.”
Highlighting his geopolitical options, Mr. Aliyev has telegraphed an ever-closer relationship with Russia without endorsing President Vladimir V. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Mr. Putin made a two-day visit to Azerbaijan in August, and Russia’s foreign intelligence chief, Sergei Naryshkin, followed up with a trip last month.
Announcing Mr. Naryshkin’s trip, his spy agency said Azerbaijan was an ally in countering Western intelligence services trying to undermine “internal political stability in our states.”
Last week, Mr. Aliyev traveled to Kazan, Russia, for Mr. Putin’s marquee geopolitical event of the year: the BRICS summit, which brought together an expanding club of non-Western countries including Brazil, India, China and South Africa.
Mr. Aliyev “doesn’t have to fear a harsh reaction from the West,” said Rauf Mirgadirov, an Azerbaijani political analyst living in exile in Switzerland. “As long as he’s not totally come under Russia’s sway, the West will be in dialogue with him.”
The U.N. climate conference, scheduled for Nov. 11-22 and with scores of world leaders in attendance, is likely to further raise Mr. Aliyev’s global stature. He has said that this year’s meeting will feature the slogan “In Solidarity for a Green World” — even though the meeting is being held in a fossil-fuel-rich autocracy, as was the case in Dubai last year.
The conference’s organizing committee, he said in a speech to delegates last month, “involves women, parliamentarians and civil society representatives.”
But Abzas Media, an independent news organization known for investigating corruption among government officials, will be among the Azerbaijani media outlets struggling to cover the conference. Six of its journalists, including its top editors, have been arrested since last November.
Leyla Mustafayeva, an Azerbaijani journalist who now runs Abzas Media from exile in Berlin, said in an interview that the summit “is a disaster for us” because it provides a distraction from Azerbaijan’s human rights abuses.
“This event is going to completely cover up all these issues,” Ms. Mustafayeva said.
The conference will come as Mr. Aliyev, 62, cements his dominance inside his country of about 10 million people. Abandoning decades of mediation efforts involving both Russia and the West, Mr. Aliyev used his modernized military to crush Armenian forces in a 44-day war in 2020 and again in a lightning operation last year.
The victories recaptured the mountainous enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh and surrounding areas, which for more than 20 years had existed as an ethnic Armenian enclave inside Azerbaijan’s internationally recognized borders. Tens of thousands of Armenians who had inhabited the region were forced to flee.
In Azerbaijan, where about 10 percent of the population was displaced from the same area by Armenia’s victory in a war between the countries in the 1990s, the victories increased Mr. Aliyev’s popularity.
Armenia and Azerbaijan are now negotiating a peace deal and potential transportation links through Armenia toward Turkey. The talks could redraw the map between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea in a way that, depending on the outcome, might reduce the influence of Russia and Iran in the region while increasing the sway of Turkey, a NATO ally.
As a result of his pivotal role in the West’s geopolitical conflicts, Mr. Aliyev does not expect any Western criticism of human rights abuses in Azerbaijan to lead to real consequences, Mr. Meister, the analyst in Berlin, said.
“Aliyev has a good negotiating position in all directions,” he said. “These regimes notice it right away when threats aren’t really meant seriously — then they go a step further.”
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