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Iryna Zubenko

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Jóhann Páll Jóhannsson, Member of Parliament for the Social Democratic party, has requested a written answer from the Prime Minister about her interactions with Björk and Greta Thunberg, reports RÚV.

In the inquiry, Jóhann Páll asks how the Prime Minister responded to their request for a declaration of a climate emergency in the fall of 2019 and whether the Minister promised Björk and Thunberg a formal declaration of such an emergency from the Minister, the Government or the Alþingi.

The member of Parliament also wants the minister to answer whether she encouraged Björk and Greta to cancel a press conference where a declaration of a climate emergency would be required, as Björk claimed in an interview on Rás 1 recently.

Björk has twice publicly criticised Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir. First, in an interview with the British newspaper the Guardian, where the singer said the Prime Minister had betrayed her and Greta Thunberg at the United Nations climate conference in New York three years ago.

Björk said that she believed that she and Thunberg had an agreement with Katrín that the Prime Minister would declare a climate emergency. “I trust her, maybe because she’s a woman, and when she gave her speech, she didn’t mention climate change. I was crazy because we had planned this for months,” said Björk in an interview with the British newspaper.

Björk then reported in an interview on Rás 1 that she and Thunberg had planned to challenge the leaders of the Nordic countries to declare a climate emergency.

The singer accused the Prime Minister of being dishonest in communication. “What I think is perhaps a little dishonest that Katrín did, is that she should have said there: ‘No, this is a bit too bold for me, the government is not going to be involved’, but what she said was ‘You don’t have to hold this press conference because I’m going to declare this anyway in my speech at the United Nations.'”

Following the interview in the Guardian, Katrín Jakobsdóttir told RÚV that she was not aware of the alleged fraud: “It is clear that she encouraged me to declare a climate emergency at this conference and did so through a message. As I told her, it was considered and discussed at the government level. Our conclusion was to have a different approach.”