Senior Officials Finalize Key Documents for Third ASEMSenior officials from the 26 Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) member countries finalized the three key documents after intensive discussions Thursday, the eve of the two-day third ASEM meeting.The documents, which will be adopted at the biennial meeting, are the Chairman's Statement, the Asia-Europe Cooperation Framework 2000 and the Declaration on Peace on the Korean Peninsula. At their meeting Thursday morning, the senior officials removed differences over the wording or some clauses in the documents, Choi Young-jin, chairman of the Senior Officials' Meeting (SOM) said. "Not only the reference topics but also the three major documents have been roughly agreed upon among the senior officials of the Seoul ASEM," said Choi, who is also the deputy minister for Policy Planning and International Organizations of South Korea's Foreign Affairs and Trade Ministry. He said that the senior officials reached agreement on most of the pending issues. "But I would say some of them have been agreed to only conditionally," the South Korean deputy minister quickly added. |
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