India and Pakistan will become full SCO members

UFA, 9 June 2017. /Bashinform News Agency/. In Astana, the next two-day Summit of the heads of the states-participants of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) began. The main outcome of the summit will be India and Pakistan joining the organization. This will make the SCO one of the largest organizations in terms of the number of people in the countries it includes - the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will unite over 3 billion people, or almost half of the world's population, RIA Novosti reports. In this connection, the President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev called the present Summit a historic event.

Igor Morgulov, the Deputy Foreign Minister of Russia, said that the scale of this event had yet to be assessed, but "it is already clear that the accession of these countries will open additional opportunities for giving a powerful impetus to the development of the SCO format, which will raise it at totally new positions in regional and world affairs". Recall, the beginning of the procedure for full-fledged accession of India and Pakistan to the SCO was started during the Ufa Summit in 2015.

Total, 11 documents will be signed at the end of the meeting. Among them there is the Astana Declaration, the Convention on Counteracting Extremism and a Joint Statement of Leaders on Countering International Terrorism.

The SCO is an international organization founded in 2001 by the leaders of China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. In June 2016, at the Summit in Uzbekistan, memorandums of accession to the organization of India and Pakistan were signed. The countries-observers in the SCO at the moment are Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia, the partner countries are Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cambodia, Nepal, Turkey and Sri Lanka.