Astana Hosted a Meeting of the CICA Senior Officials Committee

Meeting of the Senior Officials Committee of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia chaired by Alibek Bakaev, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Kazakhstan, El.kz cites MFA.

In his speech, Deputy Minister Bakaev summed up outcomes of Kazakhstan’s chairmanship in the outgoing year, informing the Member States about the progress achieved in implementing confidence-building measures within the CICA. He also outlined upcoming plans for the next year, including High-level Conference on Environmental Issues and Meeting of Volunteer Leaders Movements.

SOC Chairman shared his vision on further implementation of the CICA Transformation Roadmap, which was adopted during the Informal Meeting of the CICA Council of Foreign Ministers on September 21, 2023 in New York.

The Roadmap acts as a guide for all Member States in the process of transforming the Conference into full-fledged international organization and consists of such thematic clusters as the development of a charter, financial and budgetary reform, improvement of the regulatory framework, including issues of updating the rules of procedure and strengthening human resources capacity of the Secretariat.

As a result of the meeting, Senior officials approved the Action Plan and the budget of the Secretariat for 2024, adopted the Concept Papers in the priority areas Natural Disaster Management and Environmental Protection, coordinated by Iran and Mongolia respectively. After report on the results of the Secretariat’s work this year by Kairat Sarybai, CICA Secretary General, SOC participants authorized the Secretariat to carry out further activities to strengthen external relations with the SCO, ASEAN, and the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism.

Significant achievement in the context of expanding the geography of the Conference is the SOC’s recommendation to the Council of Foreign Ministers to grant observer status to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.