Asian Parliamentary Assembly concludes 14th plenary session
The 14th Plenary session of the Asian Parliamentary Assembly (APA) In Baku concludes today.
The session began on Tuesday and was chaired by Azerbaijan. The theme focused on “fostering regional cooperation for the sustainable development in Asia” and consisted of 40 parliamentary delegations. The session discussed the approval of Azerbaijan’s chairmanship of the assembly, as well as draft decisions presented by the standing committee on issues such economic and sustainable development, budget planning alongside political and cultural issues.
The APA is an inter-parliamentary forum incepted in 2006 with the objective of fostering dialogue, developing common strategies and coordinating the efforts of member parliaments in addressing security concerns and ensuring stability within the Asia region.
While the APA focuses on promoting a platform to further strengthen inter-parliamentary dialogue and coordinating efforts between member parliaments, this co-operation will likely be limited to addressing non-traditional security threats like climate change, migration and cybersecurity in the future. This is primarily because member state’s like India and Pakistan or North Korea and South Korea primarily view each other as political adversaries. The latter will likely handicap any collective efforts to reach a consensus or cooperation in addressing traditional security concerns.
