gotchanewsdaily.com 
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 Baku’s historic rival, 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.”
Aliyev claimed that France had caused “environmental degradation” in the territories, which he described as “colonies,” citing the nuclear tests in French Polynesia and Algeria. He also accused French President Emmanuel Macron’s government of being responsible for the violent outbursts in New Caledonia earlier this year.
