EAS Approves Three Declarations in Laos

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Leaders of ASEAN and its eight dialogue partners adopted three important documents at the 11th East Asia Summit (EAS), which was chaired by the Lao Prime Minister Thongloun Sisoulith in Vientiane, Laos yesterday.

The documents include the Vientiane Declaration on Promoting Infrastructure Development Cooperation in East Asia proposed by Laos, EAS Declaration on Strengthening Responses to Migrants in Crisis and Trafficking in Persons and EAS Statement on Non-proliferation.

The ASEAN leaders and its eight dialogue partners (China, Japan, Republic of Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, the US and Russia) met in the capital of Laos to review the cooperation over the past years, especially the implementation of six priority areas of the EAS, namely finance, education, energy and environment, global health and communicable diseases, disaster management and ASEAN Connectivity as well as the decisions and outcome documents of previous summits, particularly the Kuala Lumpur Declaration on the 10th anniversary of the East Asia Summit adopted in 2015.

The leaders reiterated the importance of the EAS as a leaders-led forum for dialogue on broad strategic, political, and economic issues of common interest and concern, and reiterated the commitment to enhancing the said mechanism with a view to contributing to the promotion of peace, stability and economic prosperity in East Asia and the world at large.

At the 10th EAS in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on November 22, 2015, leaders reaffirmed ASEAN’s central role in the EAS, and ASEAN’s commitment to work in close partnership with all EAS participating countries to ensure that the EAS would continue to be an integral component of the regional architecture.

At the previous summit, leaders also determined priority areas of cooperation such as energy, education, finance, global health including pandemics, environment and disaster management, ASEAN connectivity, according to ASEAN’s official website www.ASEAN.org

They affirmed the importance of continued efforts towards improved energy access and energy affordability, addressing regional energy security and sustainability challenges, promoting high quality energy infrastructure and keeping energy markets transparent and competitive.

In this regard, the leaders underscored the importance of clean energy, such as renewable energy, energy efficiency and clean technology applications to meet the rising energy demand of the EAS region, and particularly stressed the usefulness of sharing energy supply and demand outlooks across the EAS region to provide input for energy analysis and policy formulation to better understand potential impacts of supply shocks and disasters, according to the website.

Source: Vientiane Times