President Park Geun-hye (L) and Laotian Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith pose before their talks on the sidelines of the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) summit in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on July 15, 2016. “It must also include institutional, digital, economic and socio-cultural aspects”, he said.
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After the first round of the ASEM summit, Park and other leaders watched Mongolia’s annual “Naadam Festival”.
He also highlighted the need to strengthen the engagement of the youth and businesses, especially small-and-medium-sized firms and startups in ASEM cooperation, to initiate and implement new ideas to improve the self-reliance and benefits of people in both continents.
The capital city of Mongolia Ulaanbaatar hosts the XI ASEM Summit – a meeting of heads of states and governments of Asia and Europe.
He lauded the support of ASEM members to Vietnam’s initiative on creative education and human resource building, for sustainable development in 2017, which was launched during the 11th ASEM Summit.
Let us also collaborate to protect our global commons such as the seas and oceans in accordance with worldwide conventions.
“Let us resolve disputes peacefully, without threats or use of force, and exercise self-restraint in the conduct of activities that could escalate disputes effecting peace and stability”, he stated. “We regard it as final”, Payne said on ABC Radio.
However, Zhang Mingliang, a Southeast Asian affairs expert at Jinan University, said European nations had similar position as the U.S. over the disputes. India will continue to be a constructive partner in this endeavour, he said.
But participants defied its demands that the subject should not be brought up at ASEM, criticising Beijing by emphasising the importance of respecting the global legal frameworks that undergird cooperation on terrorism, among other issues.
Following the July 1 attack in Dhaka in which nine Italian and seven Japanese nationals were killed, summit leaders of Japan and Italy confirmed that counterterrorism measures would be taken up as an important topic at the ASEM meet and that the ASEM would issue a clear message of the global community that terrorism could never be tolerated.
ASEM is an informal dialogue process involving 51 countries from Asia and Europe and two organizations namely the Association of Southeast Asian Nations Secretariat and the European Union.
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The ASEM member nations represent 50 per cent of the world’s population, and contribute to 60 per cent of global trade.
