Why am I not participating in COP29? Our agenda—protection of the principles of climate justice—contradicts the agenda of COP29, which is held in Azerbaijan. Well-known Swedish eco-activist Greta Thunberg stated this at the conference in Yerevan Thursday on Azerbaijan’s aggression against human rights and environmental protection.
Azerbaijan, that repressive country wants to increase mineral extraction, it is responsible for ethnic cleansing. The hypocrisy and duplicity that the COP29 climate conference is being held in that country amid all this is disgusting, Thunberg added.
Azerbaijan manages not only to commit these crimes and not suffer punishment, but it is also provided with a platform for legitimizing these terrible crimes, ethnic cleansing, and greenwashing. The world is silent and gives Azerbaijan those opportunities and keeps silence, Thunberg noted.
There is a need to put an end to the fact that the COP29 conference is being held in a country that has a repressive nature and suppresses the rights of its own citizens, Thunberg said.
The ethnic cleansing for which Azerbaijan is responsible, the deprivations and sufferings experienced by many Armenians as a result of Azerbaijan’s new aggression, the oppression and forced displacement, capturing, hostage-taking, physical and psychological atrocities that people have gone through, are categorically unacceptable, Thunberg stated.
And what the world is silent about and enables Azerbaijan to carry out greenwashing, that crime is unacceptable. It is also unacceptable that countries continue to buy minerals from Azerbaijan and keep silent about all this, Thunberg said.
We cannot choose which particular rights we want to protect. If we talk about justice, we should do it for everyone, Greta Thunberg concluded.