SHANGHAI: Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will attend a meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) to be held in India next month, the Foreign Office said on Thursday.
“Bilawal Bhutto Zardari will be leading the Pakistan delegation to the SCO Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) being held on May 4-5 2023, in Goa, India,” FO spokesperson Mumtaz Zahrah Baloch announced in a weekly media briefing.
She said the foreign minister would be attending the SCO CFM meeting at the invitation of the current chairman of SCO CFM, Minister for External Affairs of the Republic of India Dr S. Jaishankar.
Earlier in January, India had invited Pakistan’s foreign minister to the SCO meeting, signalling a possible thaw in relations between the nuclear-armed rivals. The invitation from Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had been delivered by the Indian High Commission in Islamabad.
India took over the rotating presidency of the eight-member grouping in September last year, and sent formal invitations to all the SCO-member countries, including Pakistan and China.
The SCO currently has eight member countries (China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan), four observer states interested in acceding to full membership, including Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran, and Mongolia, and six “Dialogue Partners” (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Turkiye).
The FO spokesperson said that Pakistan’s participation in the SC meetings reflected the country’s commitment to the SCO Charters and processes and the importance Pakistan accorded to the region in its foreign policy priorities.
“Pakistan continues to participate in SCO meetings in keeping with our longstanding commitment to SCO,” Baloch stated.
