About 20 documents will be adopted following the meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) Heads of State Council to be held on September 15-16 in Samarkand. Natalia Stepkina, the Russian embassy's minister-counselor in China and Russia's permanent representative to the SCO secretariat, told reporters on Thursday.
"A lot of background work has been done. There is a solid package of documents - about twenty of them," she said, answering reporters' questions about what documents were planned to be adopted following the summit. According to her, "first of all it is the final declaration of the leaders, which is called the Samarkand Declaration, which will bring together the consolidated approaches of the member countries on the intra-SCO agenda and the major global and regional issues."
"Among the practical documents, I would like to single out the Action Plan for the implementation of the provisions of the SCO Treaty on Long-Term Good-Neighbourliness, Friendship and Cooperation. It is a comprehensive document that defines the main directions of work in practical areas," said the diplomat.
"The SCO is working on such areas as ensuring connectivity and the creation of effective transport corridors, as well as on such an important issue as the gradual increase of national currencies in mutual settlements. We expect that certain decisions on the implementation of practical steps in these areas will be taken," she added.
According to her, a number of conceptual policy documents in such areas as economy, energy, digitalization, transport, communications, innovations, new technologies, agriculture and plant quarantine are also prepared. "That is, the SCO's work agenda is becoming broader and broader," Stepkina stressed.
Humanitarian ties
As the diplomat pointed out, humanitarian contacts are also important. According to her, documents such as intergovernmental agreement in tourism and memorandum in the field of museums are aimed to strengthen humanitarian contacts.
"A new direction is to approve the tourist and cultural capital of the SCO. This year it will be the Indian city of Varanasi (northern Uttar Pradesh) for the period from 2022 to 2023," Stepkina said. "There is a plan of events, let's hope it's an interesting area of cooperation," she added.
Interaction issue
In her opinion, the meeting will be the first face-to-face meeting of leaders in three years, which will give impetus and boost interaction within the organization.
As the diplomat noted, live communication and personal contacts are extremely important to discuss the most important issues. "Therefore, we assume that this time our leaders will be able to have a frank, trusting and open conversation on all the key problematic points of the current international and regional agenda," she pointed out. Stepkina also noted that the leaders will be able to discuss internal issues of the SCO, development of practical cooperation, increasing the efficiency of its work and strengthening the organization's position in the world.
"We expect that the summit results will be an important factor in strengthening the role and position of the SCO in the modern system of international relations, expanding the geographical area and directions of practical cooperation, strengthening humanitarian and cultural ties, which is important for sustainable development, stability and security," continued the diplomat.
She stressed that "of course, the pandemic, the lockdowns, the lack of personal contacts - although they are now being resumed - had a certain negative effect on multilateral cooperation." "I hope that this summit will give a certain impetus, it will activate interaction, maybe there will be some new ideas on how to improve the work of the forum, because the world does not stand still, everything changes, no matter how successful our format is, we still need to think about how to adapt it to new conditions," summed up Stepkina.
The SCO is an international organization founded in 2001 with India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, China, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan as members. The observer countries are Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia; the partner countries are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Turkey and Sri Lanka. The SCO summit will be held in Samarkand on September 15-16.
GSV "Russia - Islamic World"
Photo: sco-russia2020.ru/Creative Commons 4.0
Based on materials from TASS