BEIJING: Chinese President Xi Jinping has accepted the invitation to attend the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit, which will be hosted by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a virtual format next week, according to the Chinese foreign ministry.
The 23rd meeting of the Council of Heads of State of the SCO will take place on July 4, and President Xi Jinping will deliver important remarks via video conference from Beijing, as reported by Chinese news agency Xinhua.
SCO Foreign Ministers Summit in Goa
India recently hosted the SCO foreign ministers meeting in Goa, where all member states, including China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan, were present. Additionally, observer states Iran, Belarus, and Mongolia have also been invited to the upcoming summit. Turkmenistan has been invited as the guest of the chair, following the SCO tradition.
Apart from the member states and observer states, heads of six international and regional organizations have been invited, including the United Nations, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU), and the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA). The heads of the SCO secretariat and the SCO RATS (Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure) will also be present.
The SCO is a prominent economic and security bloc and has grown into one of the largest transregional international organizations. India assumed the rotating chairmanship of the SCO at the Samarkand Summit on September 16 last year.
