Greta Thunberg protests against Azerbaijan hosting global climate summit

TBILISI, Georgia — Climate activist Greta Thunberg on Monday attended a rally in Georgia to protest against Azerbaijan hosting the annual United Nations climate talks.

Thunberg and scores of other activists who rallied in Tbilisi, the capital of the South Caucasus nation, argued that Azerbaijan doesn't deserve to host the climate talks because of its repressive policies.

U.N. climate talks, called COP29, opened Monday in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, a major oil producer where the world’s first oil well was drilled.

Thunberg described Azerbaijan as “a repressive, occupying state, which has committed ethnic cleansing, and which is continuing cracking down on Azerbaijani civil society." She charged that the Caspian Sea nation has used the summit as “a chance to greenwash their crimes and human rights abuses.”

"We can't give them any legitimacy in this situation, which is why we are standing here and saying no to greenwashing and no to the Azerbaijani regime,” she said.

Azerbaijan has committed to clean energy projects, but critics have argued that’s just to export more oil and gas.

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has been in power since 2003 when he succeeded his father who died after ruling the oil rich nation for the previous decade. He has been accused by critics of intolerance to dissent and freedom of speech.

Earlier this year, Aliyev won another seven-year presidential term in an election that monitors from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe said took place in a “restrictive environment” with no real political competition. Aliyev called the early vote while enjoying a surge in popularity after Azerbaijani forces in September 2023 swiftly reclaimed the Karabakh region from ethnic Armenian separatists, who had controlled it for three decades.

After Azerbaijan regained full control of Karabakh, most of its 120,000 Armenian residents fled. The Azerbaijani authorities, however, said they were welcome to stay and promised their human rights would be ensured.

Thunberg, 21, has inspired a global youth movement demanding stronger efforts to fight climate change after staging weekly protests outside the Swedish parliament starting in 2018.

The European climate service Copernicus announced earlier this month that the world is on pace for 1.5 degrees of warming this year, which is heading to become the hottest year in human civilization.

Speaking at the rally in Tbilisi on Monday, Thunberg emphasized that the hottest year ever recorded comes after global greenhouse gas emissions reached an all time high last year. Holding the climate change conference "in an authoritarian petro state is beyond absurd,” she said.