While this is able to additionally enhance Azerbaijan’s home greenhouse gasoline emissions tally, it solely shifts the air pollution drawback to those that buy its gasoline exports.
Climate accounting usually doesn’t take exported emissions into consideration, that means the burden of air pollution falls on international locations that import and eat vitality.
That’s why there must be higher scrutiny of the whole vitality community, from producer to vendor to purchaser, a lot of which has a robust Western footprint, stated Kate Watters, director of Crude Accountability, a human rights and on the setting for the Caspian basin. .
It is deeply involved about allegations regarding Azerbaijan’s poor human rights document, lack of transparency on key points and entrenched ranges of corruption, by-products of a resource-rich and largely state-controlled financial system.
“I believe some of the necessary issues to know is our duty as Western shoppers of fossil fuels in what is occurring in Azerbaijan proper now,” he stated, mentioning the massive investments of corporations resembling BP, Total and ExxonMobil, the biggest Europe’s shut dependence on its international locations’ vitality exports and worldwide inexperienced financing flowing into renewable vitality tasks which are successfully changing the home gasoline that powers Azerbaijan’s oil sector.
“If we have a look at the availability chain from finish to finish, are they merely exporting their carbon emissions to Europe? Does this actually reply the questions of the way to obtain a greener future, a future with much less carbon emissions? No, simply transfer the items,” he stated.
According to the 2023 Corruption Perception Index, revealed by Transparency International, Azerbaijan ranks 154th out of 180 international locations with a rating of 23 out of 100, making it some of the corrupt international locations on the planet.
In October, members of the European Parliament strongly condemned “the Azerbaijani regime’s long-standing inner and extraterritorial repression of activists, journalists, opposition leaders and others” and in addition labeled its “persevering with human rights violations. .. incompatible with the group of the local weather convention.”
They known as on the European Commission to droop the strategic vitality partnership between the EU and Azerbaijan.
The human rights scenario in Azerbaijan was additionally reviewed for the fourth time on the finish of 2023 by the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review Working Group, with 319 suggestions made.
The authorities agreed to undertake 185 of them, together with measures associated to civil and political rights, anti-corruption and nationwide human rights laws.
President Ilham Aliyev has beforehand labeled allegations of corruption by his household and authorities as “innuendos or half-truths aimed toward discrediting Azerbaijan’s picture and weakening Azerbaijan’s place.”
