By Vestnik Kavkaza
Last week the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers was held in Moscow, as well as a meeting of the ministers with President of Russia Vladimir Putin. The session was organized within the framework of preparations for the key event of the year for the organization – the summit of heads of member-states of the SCO, which will be held in Ufa on July 8-10th.
According to Bakhtiyor Khakimov, the representative of the President of the Russian Federation for the SCO, the Council of Foreign Ministers marked the beginning of the final stage of the Russian chairmanship of the organization and the approach of the upcoming summit of the SCO in UFA.
“The SCO Council of Foreign Ministers is the final stage of preparation. By tradition, the foreign ministers consider those projects of documents that will be submitted to heads of state. Of course, the ministers discussed both international and regional topical problems. This conversation was continued in a larger format at the high-level conference with the participation of member states, observers and dialogue partners,” Khakimov said at a press conference on the results of the Council.
According to him, the problems of regional security in the context of increasing challenges and threats were discussed at the conference. “They are obvious: terrorism, drug trafficking and extremism. Special attention was paid to the threat of the actions of Islamic State, as well as the activation of radical extremism. Various initiatives were announced, including a Russian initiative – the proposal to consider the problems of extremism in a particular format, for example, in the form of a special conference,” the representative of the President of the Russian Federation for the SCO noted.
Another important result of the Council of Foreign Ministers was that the ministers approved a draft decision of the Council of Heads of SCO Member States on beginning the procedure of receiving India and Pakistan to the SCO. “This document will be submitted for consideration, approval and signing by the heads of state, after which it comes into force. According to the foreign ministers, if the meeting in Ufa is successful, the adoption of such a document will mark the beginning of the process of negotiating on the terms, modalities, details, technical, organizational and even financial, and joining one or another state to the SCO,” Khakimov explained.
He said that the process is quite difficult and long, because, in accordance with the documents of the SCO, the applicant state must join all the international agreements which have been signed and adopted in the context of the SCO, above all, joining the Charter: “And if we speak about the total number, now we have 27 documents. They have a different status, including basic documents, which must be ratified.”
