STATE SECRETARY ATTENDS MEETING OF ARF

Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia /MONTSAME/ The State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs B.Batkhishig expressed a position of Mongolia's government at the ASEAN Regional Forum Senior Officials meeting on May 26 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

He spoke about actions of the Community of Democracies (CD), chaired by Mongolia, and the Asian Partnership for Democracy, co-initiated by the Presidents of Mongolia and the Republic of Korea. He expressed a willingness of Mongolia to implement the common goals for the democracy together with the regional partners and to share experiences in developing the democracy.

B.Batkhishig also reported on international conference on women's leadership to run this June in Ulaanbaatar, and asked the ARF members to attend this conference. He congratulated the people and government of the Republic of the Union of Myanmar on making vital steps to develop the democracy, and said Mongolia is ready to help Myanmar in strengthening the democratic actions.

The ARF meeting made a decision to run a meeting of experts of the ARF peacekeeping operations in Ulaanbaatar together with Indonesia in August of 2012.

This year's meeting of the ARF discussed ways of enhancing cooperation on disaster relief, maritime security, non- proliferation and disarmament, and anti-terrorism and crimes. The one-day meeting was attended by senior officials from 28 countries. According to the forum's agenda, they also discussed and adopted the reports on confidence building measures and preventive diplomacy, disaster relief, maritime security, non-proliferation and disarmament, counter-terrorism and transnational crimes and ARF disaster relief exercise 2012.

They debated on the ARF ongoing initiatives, including the ARF work plan on maritime security, draft ARF work plan on non- proliferation and disarmament, draft ARF statement on cooperation in ensuring international information security, draft concept paper on the establishment of the ARF transnational threat information sharing center, draft concept paper on best practices for implementation of a disease surveillance system, and draft concept paper on a workshop on space security for the ARF, as well as draft concept paper on a workshop on seismic monitoring.

B.Khuder