The way forward: External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee welcomes his Pakistan counterpart Inam-ul-Haq and Pakistan High Commissioner to India Shahid Malik at the 29th SAARC Ministers meeting in New Delhi on Friday.
NEW DELHI: As the first step towards setting up a SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) security network, legal experts from the eight member-countries will meet in Colombo to finalise the text of a mutual legal assistance agreement, External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee said here on Friday.
Talking to journalists after a meeting of the SAARC Council of Ministers, Mr. Mukherjee discounted suggestions of discord over the agreement that was aimed at “tackling criminals and checking undesirable activity.” He felt the text would be finalised in Colombo by April next year.
“No disparate views”
“In our deliberations, there were no disparate views even when it was specifically mentioned that the agreement should be expedited in order to operationalise it quickly. I do hope when we have discussions [on the finalised text] we will arrive at a conclusion and go by it,” he said.
Mr. Mukherjee, however, felt that for a viable security network, first there should be an exchange of information as many SAARC countries were victims of terror. “Therefore, hard, real-time exchange of information is an important aspect that we will have to take into account.”
Social projects
The meeting of the SAARC Council of Ministers resolved to operationalise the SAARC Development Fund, initially on the basis of India’s unilateral commitment of $ 100 millions. The fund was envisaged to have a corpus of $ 300 millions and India hade made the offer even before the fund was conceptualised. The amount would be earmarked for social projects and work would begin soon, said Mr. Mukherjee.
The meeting also saw a SAARC Declaration on Climate Change, in which the Foreign Ministers called upon the international community to honour its commitments with the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol.
The Declaration said the way forward must include provision of adequate resources to tackle climate change without detracting from the funds for development, effective access and funding assistance for transfer of environment-friendly technologies, and adoption of binding GHG (greenhouse gas emission) reduction commitments by developed countries with effective timeframes. The Ministers emphasised the need for equitable burden sharing.
The Ministers also stressed that contributions to the global effort to tackle climate change should be in line with the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities. “We also believe that developed countries must assume greater commitments in line with their responsibility.”
