when climate and political issues collide – Swiss Catholic Portal

The environmental issues raised by Cop29, the United Nations Climate Conference which begins on November 11, 2024 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, are heavier than ever, but calls to boycott the Conference have been launched. In Geneva, a prayer service in solidarity with the Armenians was organized.

World leaders meeting in Baku for COP29 are called upon to set the new amount of aid paid to developing countries to deal with global warming and its ever-increasing disasters. During the Angelus on November 10, in St. Peter’s Square in Rome, Pope Francis said he hoped “that the conference on climate change, COP29, which will begin tomorrow in Baku, will make an effective contribution to the protection of the common house.

Rome’s discretion on this issue

Several Vatican observers noted the pope’s omission of the name of the organizing country, Azerbaijan, in conflict with neighboring Armenia for decades in the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, an enclave ceded by Stalin in 1923 to the Azerbaijan, but populated mainly by Armenians.

Following the wars of 2020 and 2023 and the reconquest of the region by Azerbaijan, more than 100,000 Armenians were forced into exodus. “The relative neglect of the Holy See and the Pope in this very complex matter in terms of international law still gives rise to numerous criticisms and misunderstandings,” writes the Imedia agency.

A call to boycott the Conference

Many Christian personalities and organizations, on the other hand, including the Œuvre d’Orient or Christian Solidarity International, have called for a boycott of this international conference due to the authoritarian nature of the regime and the ethnic cleansing carried out in Artsakh.

On November 2, in anticipation of Cop29, three Church leaders of Armenia – Aram I, Catholicos of the Armenian Apostolic Church, Raphael Bedros II, Catholicos-Patriarch of the Catholic Church in Armenia, and Paul Haidostian, President of the Union of Armenian Evangelical Churches in the Middle East – published a joint declaration denouncing in particular “the forced evacuation of 120,000 Armenians from their historic homeland through Azerbaijan”, and demanding their return.

In Switzerland, the World Council of Churches, for its part, called for the immediate release of all Armenian civilian hostages and prisoners of war, in accordance with the norms of international law. He also invited, in collaboration with the Armenian community, to a day of prayer for Armenia on November 10, 2024, with a prayer service organized at Saint-Pierre Cathedral in Geneva. (cath.ch/lb)