Since at least 2010, Nathalie Goulet has been a key lobbyist for the Azerbaijani dictatorship in France, particularly in the Senate, where she has been a senator since 2007.
Nathalie Goulet Milsztein, born on May 24, 1958, has been a member of the French Senate since 2007, as part of the Union Centriste group. A lawyer by profession, she was disbarred in 2000 for “serious and repeated breaches of the essential principles of the profession and contrary to honor and probity”. She re-joined the bar in 2011 and definitively ceased her activities as a lawyer in October 2018, after having received 50,000 euros between March and December 2017 as an associate for the Dan Shefet law firm, even though in March 2017 she tabled a bill whose co-author turned out to be her employer.
Nathalie Goulet is a member of the board of directors of the Association des Amis de l'Azerbaïdjan, vice-president of the France-Azerbaijan friendship group in the French Senate, and a pillar of pro-Azerbaijan lobbying in France since at least 2010, the year of her first statements in support of Ilham Aliyev's dictatorship. As early as July 2010, in a speech to the French Senate, Nathalie Goulet called for more travel by French diplomats to Azerbaijan, to ensure that France did not take a position in favor of the Republic of Artsakh, and criticized the weight of the French diaspora in France. In 2012, at the time of the vote on the law criminalizing the denial of the Armenian genocide, Nathalie Goulet declared that “the French Parliament will never adopt the bill criminalizing the denial of the so-called Armenian genocide” (she would later refute having used the expression “so-called”). In the same year, she wrote that she had always “regarded the Armenian community with suspicion”.
In the years that followed, she continued to campaign for more exchanges between France and Azerbaijan, even accompanying François Hollande on his trip to Azerbaijan in May 2014, where she claims to have regularly traveled with her husband Daniel Goulet, a former UMP senator who died in 2007. In 2015, Nathalie Goulet travelled to Baku to meet Mehriban Aliyeva, wife of the Azerbaijani dictator, as part of the “3rd World Forum on Intercultural Dialogue”.
However, also in 2015, she was found to have received nearly 250,000 euros over five years from the Heydar Aliyev Foundation via the Fondation du Patrimoine de Basse-Normandie, officially for the restoration of churches in the region. Furthermore, in her declaration to the Haute Autorité pour la Transparence de la Vie Publique, Nathalie Goulet states that she is a “volunteer member” of the Nizami Ganjavi International Center (Azerbaijan), under the category “Volunteer functions likely to give rise to a conflict of interest”. This obviously raises questions about the financing of his many trips to Azerbaijan since 2010. It is also astonishing to note that she is an “independent observer” on two occasions in Azerbaijan, notably during the 2016 constitutional referendum, which concerned, among other things, the extension of the presidential term of office.
In 2020, she declared: “I will not see Nagorno-Karabakh in my soul, but with my own eyes”, and in 2021, she repeated the regime's rhetoric about demining Artsakh. The same year, she travelled to Azerbaijan at the invitation of the famous Nizami Gandjavi International Center, in particular to visit the “liberated territories”. On September 28, 2023, following the Azerbaijani offensive in Artsakh, she declared "Welcome back home, Karabakh!".
Azerbaijan uses all available means and relays to silence its wars and crimes.
