Date of GUAM ministerial meeting publicized

A meeting of the GUAM Council of Foreign Ministers will be held in Kiev on Feb. 24, GUAM Secretary General Valeri Chechelashvili said.

“Agenda of the GUAM ministerial meeting will include issues of political cooperation, sectoral cooperation, and institutional and organizational issues," Chechelashvili told Trend.

He said that at this meeting Ukraine will transfer presidency in GUAM to Moldova.

According to Chechelashvili, respectively, a report of the chairman on the organization’s activity will be reviewed and a plan of the program of Moldova’s chairmanship will be approved.

Ministers will provide a political assessment of the cooperation development in GUAM format, and will mark priorities for the future, he said.

Chechelashvili said that GUAM is increasingly gaining momentum in terms of concrete projects.

"Such projects of GUAM as the development and introduction of joint tourism product with Japan, free trade zone in the territory of GUAM, which in 2010, according to my estimates, reached its historical upper limit at more than $ 4 billion, new ways and methods of combating organized crime - all these fills cooperation within GUAM with new content," he said.

According to Chechelashvili, it helps materialize the potential obtained by organization, and contributed to a more active political interaction.

"A new chairman will present specific plans, and I expect active discussions at the ministerial meeting. Secretariat expects new instructions from the ministers, in order to try to fully implement them and to help the new chairman in their implementation," Chechelashvili said.

GUAM was established by Azerbaijan, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine in 1997 during the EU presidential summit in Strasbourg. In 1999, Uzbekistan joined the organization, and left four years later. A decision was made to announce GUAM as an international organization under the new name, "Organization for Democracy and Economic Development - GUAM," at the organization's first summit in Kiev in 2006.


/Trend/