France boycotts COP29 after Azerbaijan’s “colonies” attack

PanARMENIAN.Net - France’s top climate official is skipping the COP29 climate negotiations in Azerbaijan after the host country’s president accused France of “brutally” suppressing climate change concerns in its overseas territories, POLITICO reports.

“After discussion and in agreement with the president of the republic and the prime minister, I will not go to Baku next week,” French Ecological Transition Minister Agnès Pannier-Runachertold the French Senate on Wednesday, November 13, denouncing the remarks as “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable.”

“Azerbaijan is instrumentalizing the fight against climate change for its undignified personal agenda,” Pannier-Runacher fumed.

The French climate minister's withdrawal means Paris will not send any high-level political representative to Baku, as French President Emmanuel Macron will also skip the event.

The decision means that for the first time since the 2015 Paris Agreement — which France helped engineer and has since strongly defended — a COP will take place without senior French leadership.

The dispute also deepens a growing rift between France and Azerbaijan over Paris’ military support for Armenia.

The COP spat kicked off Wednesday morning, when Ilham Aliyev, the Azerbaijani autocrat, used a gathering of island leaders to lambast France and the Netherlands for their “neocolonialism,” which he linked to climate change.

“The so-called overseas territories of France and Netherlands, particularly in the Caribbean and the Pacific, are among the most severely impacted” by climate change, Aliyev told the leaders’ summit of small island developing countries at COP29. “The voices of these communities are often brutally suppressed by the regimes.”