SCO youth league to hold first model summit on June 2

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‍‍Students and young professionals from the member countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will take part in the first Model SCO Youth Conference 2018 at the organization’s Beijing headquarters on Sunday, exactly a week before the leaders of the 18-nation Eurasian grouping meet for their annual summit in China’s eastern coastal city of Qingdao.

The youth conference being organized by the SCO Countries Youth League will see participants from the eight full members China, India, Kazhakstan, Kyrgystan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan – as well as the four observer states Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia – deliberate on key issues on the SCO agenda that are expected to be discussed at the Qingdao summit by the leaders.

However the six SCO dialogue partners – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Turkey – won’t be represented at the conference table in line with the format being followed at the SCO leadership summit.

“It is very important to know that all the issues that we are bringing, that we are trying to discuss on a young professionals’ level, on a student level, are going to be those issues which are going to be discussed on the summit,” Nazerke Aibar, one of the three members of the organizing committee for the Model SCO Youth Conference told CGTN Digital.

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The conference is aimed at bringing together youth talents from SCO member and observer states to promote mutual dialogue, cultural exchanges and share new ideas. It will also serve as a platform for the participants to engage in productive discussion on political, security and socio-economic developments in the region.

The young delegates are expected to announce a joint statement at the end of the deliberations, which will be presented to the SCO Secretary-General Rashid Alimov, who will also deliver the concluding speech at the youth conference.

“We invited the Secretary-General to our event and the paper that we are going to present will be heard and will be given to the SCO Secretariat,” said Aibar, a Kazakh national and an economics and management scholar at Yenching Academy of Peking University.

The young participants hope to put the youth agenda on top and are positive that the SCO leadership will take up their concerns at the highest level.

“One of the topics which will be discussed by the leaders of our countries [in Qingdao] is youth activities and the future of young people, and I think it is a very pragmatic approach,” said Odil Gafarov from Uzbekistan, who’s also a member of the organizing committee.

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Gafarov, who’s also Aibar’s batchmate at the Yenching Academy, volunteered earlier at the SCO leadership summits in Tashkent in 2010 and 2016.

Both Aibar and Gafarov stressed that there’s immense enthusiasm about the youth conference among the members of the SCO Countries Youth League.

“It is very important that SCO is taking into account perspectives of youth and of young people on what is going in our region, and what is going to be discussed, and what are the solutions that we propose that are going to be discussed by leaders of the SCO member states, just a week after our conference is held,” she added

“The organizations which are interested in investing in new generation of the young leaders, they will have a bright future,” concluded Gafarov.

SCO Countries Youth League was founded in April 2017 as an independent, non-profit, inclusive youth organization, which is aimed at providing a platform for students and young professionals from SCO countries, to strengthen mutual ties, promote dialogue and share ideas.

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