India to invite Imran Khan for Shanghai Council meet

News: Prime Minister of Pakistan will be invited to participate in the Heads of Government Council meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) that will be hosted in India in 2020

Facts:

About Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO)

• The Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) is a permanent intergovernmental international organisation
• It was founded in 2001 in Shanghai by Kazakhstan, China, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan.
• The Secretariat of SCO is based in Beijing, China.

Members:

• The members of the SCO are China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. India and Pakistan were admitted to the SCO as permanent members in 2017.
• The SCO has four observer states, Afghanistan, Belarus, Iran and Mongolia.
• It has six dialogue partners, namely Azerbaijan, Armenia, Cambodia, Nepal, Turkey and Sri Lanka.

Goals:

• strengthening mutual trust and neighbourliness among the member states;
• promoting their effective cooperation in politics, trade, the economy, research, technology, culture, education, energy, transport, tourism, environmental protection,
• making joint efforts to maintain and ensure peace, security and stability in the region;
• Moving towards the establishment of a democratic, fair and rational new international political and economic order.

Organizational Structure:

• The Heads of State Council (HSC) is the supreme decision-making body in the SCO. It meets once a year and adopts decisions and guidelines on all important matters of the organisation.
• The SCO Heads of Government Council (HGC) meets once a year to discuss the organisation’s multilateral cooperation strategy and priority areas, to resolve current important economic and other cooperation issues. It also approves the organisation’s annual budget.
• SCO has two permanent bodies —
  • SCO Secretariat based in Beijing, China and
  • Executive Committee of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS) based in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. RATS serves to promote cooperation of member states against the terrorism, separatism and extremism.