Azeri Officials Block COP29.com Website After It Was Acquired By Global Witness To Target Oil Majors

Any delegates at Cop29 in Baku clicking on cop29.com today were greeted with the following message: “The application you are trying to use has been blocked in accordance with Cop29 policy rules. Please report to information center if you believe this is an error.” It’s no error by the Azerbaijan government hosting the summit. The site was acquired by campaign group Global Witness and leads with the faces of five big oil bosses and the headline: “Fossil fuel companies are destroying the planet for profit. They broke it, they should pay for it.”

The site has also been reportedly blocked outside the conference by the authoritarian regime. It remains accessible to those using a VPN to browse the web. “We may never know why Azerbaijan tried to block cop29.com from its citizens and the world’s decision-makers attending Cop29,” says Alexander Kirk at Global Witness. “But it looks like they’re worried about our central message: if you break it, you should fix it, and Big Oil should be made to pay.”

Azerbaijan is a petrostate, heavily reliant on oil and gas, which is a “gift from God”, according to President Ilham Aliyev. It is significantly expanding gas production in the next decade, despite repeated warnings from scientists that no new fossil fuels can be exploited if there is to be any chance of keeping global temperature rise below 1.5C. Azerbaijan says the EU has requested more gas, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Global Witness acquired the cop29.com site from an Indian couple who used the domain for their family copperware business – 29 is the atomic number of copper. They were offered a significant sum by Azerbaijan’s Cop29 team for the site, Global Witness said, but the owners were worried about climate breakdown and decided to let Global Witness have it instead.

EDIT

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/live/2024/nov/22/cop-29-live-poor-countries-may-have-to-compromise-on-climate-funding-says-former-un-envoy