The Senior Officials Committee (SOC) meeting of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA) in Astana on 22 August 2023 completed its work and finalized the draft Road Map for CICA Transformation aimed at strengthening the organization and Asia’s role in international politics in general.
This process was launched by the decision of the Sixth CICA Summit in October 2022, the year of the 30th anniversary of the initiative to convene this organization put forward by Kazakhstan at the UN in 1992.
The Road Map for CICA Transformation, after endorsement by the CICA Council of Foreign Ministers at its meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York in September this year, will become the agenda of specific reforms necessary to adapt CICA to a new global role of Asia.
The SOC also recommended that the CICA Ministerial Council endorse the draft Ministerial Statement on Promoting Volunteerism for Sustainable Development. This document will create a new direction for CICA activities in support of civic engagement in its Member States.
The SOC also considered the current issues of coordinating the implementation of CICA confidence building measures and approved Russia as coordinator and China as co-coordinator in the priority area “Security of and in the Use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)” for 2024-2025.
The CICA senior officials also considered the draft Ministerial Council Decision on Modalities of Implementation of CICA Confidence Building Measures and agreed that consultations on this document will continue. The main purpose of the document is to streamline and further improve the methods and effectiveness of the implementation of CICA confidence building measures and, thereby, strengthen the practical impact of the core CICA activities.
The SOC has also started the process of preparing the annual CICA action plan for 2024 on the implementation of confidence building measures.
*The Senior Officials Committee is the basic decision-making body for the implementation of agreements and decisions of the Summit and the Ministerial Council. It adopts decisions on key issues concerning the development of interaction within CICA, as well as administrative and financial issues of the Secretariat’s activities and all issues submitted to it by the Special Working Group.
