Summing up results of the SCO Ministerial Council session, Sergei Lavrov remarked, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization intends to polish the mechanism new countries use to join the SCO.

The official reminded, a while ago the SCO decided to introduce the SCO dialogue partner status. “After considering a relevant application today, we decided to recommend that the heads of state should provide this status to Belarus and Sri Lanka. A decision has been made to continue working on the membership regulations, primarily, from the point of view of the accession of new countries to the organisation”.

President of Belarus Alexander Lukashenko in his address to the nation and the National Assembly underscored that the establishment of tight relations with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization will contribute to increasing the international authority of Belarus and gaining the SCO partner status in the future.

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is a sub-regional international organisation of Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. The territory of its member-states makes up 61% of Eurasia’s total territory, its total demographic potential — a quarter of the planet’s population, while the economic potential includes the world’s second most powerful economy — China. In 2002 in Saint Petersburg SCO heads signed a charter to formalise the organisation de jure.