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YEREVAN, NOVEMBER 11, ARMENPRESS. French politician Anne-Laurence Petel has said that President Emmanuel Macron has made the right decision to not participate in the COP-29 in Azerbaijan.
“He’s made a right decision, because going to Baku contains the risk of shaking the hand of the dictator and legitimizing the explicit imitation, because Azerbaijan is absolutely not a country that participated in ecological transition,” Anne-Laurence Petel said in an interview with Sud Radio. “Azerbaijan is a petro-dictatorship and a country where the human rights situation is disastrous. Emmanuel Macron has actively supported Armenia since 2020, when the war in Nagorno-Karabakh began. He has done a lot in order for Europe to support Armenia in withstanding Azerbaijan.”
France is represented at COP-29 by Agnès Pannier-Runacher, Minister of Ecological Transition of France.
Asked whether Paris wasn’t supposed to completely boycott COP-29, the politician said, "There’s a difference between a complete boycott and sending technical experts or not political figures. I think if we want to participate from an ecological perspective, we can send specialists or experts, but I don’t understand why we should have a political representation or participation of a cabinet member. I think we could have refrained from that presence. Today we must understand that Ilham Aliyev is the person who not only started a horrifying war in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020 with the use of phosphorus bombs, but is also a dictator in his own country, because there are 300 political prisoners there.”
Anne-Laurence Petel accused Aliyev of interfering into French domestic affairs.
“Approximately 1,5 years ago, he created the so-called Baku Initiative Group, which is focused on uniting regionalists and separatists, be it in New Caledonia, Corsica or in other regions of France. Their goal is to create instability in the country. I’d like to stress that Aliyev’s opponent who was in exile and was living in France was killed in October 2024 in Mulhouse. Today, opposition blogger Mahammad Mirzali is under French police protection, lives in France, and there’ve been several attempts on his life in France,” Petel said.