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CSTO interstate commission to discuss military-economic cooperation

The participants plan to adopt several documents aimed at strengthening military and economic cooperation between the CSTO member states

BISHKEK, October 6 (Itar-Tass) —— The interstate commission of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation (CSTO) will meet in Bishkek for its ninth session to discuss economic and military cooperation in the years to come.

Officials from the CSO Secretariat, members of the Business Council under the interstate commission, and Kyrgyzstan’s Minister of Economic Regulation Uchkun Tashbayev will attend the meeting.

The participants plan to adopt several documents aimed at strengthening military and economic cooperation between the CSTO member states.

They will also debate a programme of military-economic cooperation up to 2015, a list of enterprises and organisations whose specialisation should be preserved in the interests of military-economic cooperation, as well as suggestions regarding the drafting of a programme for creating a system for controlling the CSTO collective security capabilities until 2015.

The agenda also includes a draft agreement on standardisation of defence products in the CSTO, development of mechanisms for forming, coordinating and approving lists of military products under the agreement on cooperation among the CSTO member states.

The CSTO is a military-political alliance of seven countries: Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan. It was created on the basis of the Collective Security Treaty of the May 15, 1992, which was turned into an international organisation on May 14, 2002. The CSTO received the status of observer at the U.N. General Assembly on December 2, 2004.

The purpose of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation is to guarantee the national security of each of its members and to ensure their territorial integrity. In case of a menace, looming over any member-country, all the other CSTO participants will be duty-bound to give it all the necessary aid, including military assistance. The military-political relations among the CSTO nations hold supremacy over their military relations and contacts with third countries, which are not CSTO members.

The Treaty's overall system of collective security includes some regional subsystems, acting in three directions: in the European direction (the Russian-Belarusian military group) and in the Caucasian direction (the Russian-Armenian group).