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BRICS likely to establish Parliamentary Assembly

Closer BRICS inter-parliamentary cooperation will be discussed during an official visit by Speaker of Russia’s lower house of parliament to India starting on Thursday
Leaders of BRICS countries during the summit in Brazil  EPA/Jarbas Oliveira
Leaders of BRICS countries during the summit in Brazil
© EPA/Jarbas Oliveira

NEW DELHI, January 26. /TASS/. The BRICS grouping of the world’s five major emerging economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) is likely to establish its Parliamentary Assembly, with measures to intensify the grouping’s inter-parliamentary cooperation expected to be discussed in India on Thursday.

Closer BRICS inter-parliamentary cooperation will be discussed during an official visit by Speaker of Russia’s State Duma (the lower house of parliament) Sergey Naryshkin to India, which is beginning on Thursday.

BRICS countries have intensified their cooperation lately and the RIC grouping (Russia, India and China) has been developing actively, said Alexey Pushkov, head of the State Duma Committee for International Affairs who is among members of the Russian delegation heading for India.

"It is logical to add the parliamentary dimension to this because India, like Russia, speaks within the BRICS grouping for restructuring the global financial system and generally restructuring the vector fields in the contemporary world and reforming international institutions, including the reform of the UN Security Council in the long run," Pushkov said.

"We are going to establish and develop the parliamentary component within the multilateral format of the BRICS and also within the RIC," he added.

State Duma Speaker Naryshkin earlier confirmed in a talk with journalists he was planning to discuss during his visit to India the agenda of establishing the BRICS parliamentary dimension.

A summit of BRICS parliamentary speakers will be held in the first ten days of June in Moscow to focus on such issues as "protecting international law and drawing the youth into various formats of the BRICS parliamentary dimension," Naryshkin said.

"This is what I’ll be talking about as part of my visit to India," Naryshkin said.

The State Duma office for public relations said ahead of the Duma delegation’s visit to India that Naryshkin was expected to meet with Indian President Pranab Mukherjee, hold talks with Speaker of the Indian House of the People Sumitra Mahajan and Indian Vice-President and Chairman of the Council of States (the upper house of India’s parliament) Mohammad Hamid Ansari, and also attend the 3rd session of the Russian-Indian parliamentary commission.

"The chairman of the State Duma intends to take part in round table discussions on Russian-Indian cooperation within the BRICS format and historical and cultural aspects of bilateral relations," the Duma office for public relations said.