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CIS countries to coordinate information security approaches, says Lavrov

05 April 2019 17:54 (UTC +04:00)

Member-countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) have agreed to coordinate their actions to protect the UN Charter’s norms and principles, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday following a meeting of the CIS Council of Foreign Ministers, ONA reports citing ITAR-TASS.

"We exchanged views on the key international issues in light of those challenges and threats, which, unfortunately, have been piling up on the global stage," the minister pointed out. "We looked at how international law is being significantly eroded, how meddling in sovereign countries’ domestic affairs is practiced depending on political expediency, with the methods of ultimatums and the policy of dictating one’s terms being used increasingly more often."

"Our common opinion was the need to coordinate more closely our actions as CIS members and with other countries in terms of protecting the norms and principles of the UN Charter," Lavrov said. "We discussed in detail issues related to multilateral cooperation within the CIS, including in foreign policy. In order to strengthen the coordination of our actions, we amended the plan of inter-ministerial consultations within the Commonwealth for 2019 and, at the same time, took note of the successful compliance with a similar plan for 2018."

According to Russia’s top diplomat, the CIS member-states assign high priority to the initiative put forward by Turkmenistan’s President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov regarding the intensification of partnership between the CIS diplomatic services. "This program is in a high degree of readiness. We hope to complete work on that very important document soon," he added.

Lavrov noted that the ministers spoke a lot about human rights issues and ways of promoting the principles enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. "We agreed to push ahead with efforts to coordinate our actions in the human rights sphere," he said. According to the Russian foreign minister, the parties also discussed the current state and prospects for Eurasian integration and the CIS’s role in that process.