The UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, Volkan Bozkir, President of the 75th Session of the UN General Assembly, UN Under-Secretary-General, High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and Small Island Developing States Fekitamoeloa Katoa ‘Utoikamanu, Foreign Ministers of about two dozen countries and heads of international organizations also participated in the meeting, which was chaired by Mukhtar Tleuberdi, the Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan.
In his remarks, Minister Mnatsakanyan thanked his Kazakh counterpart Mukhtar Tleuberdi for Kazakhstan's effective Chairmanship in the UN Group of Landlocked Developing Countries and the efforts towards advancing this very important agenda. The Minister also expressed his deep gratitude to the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Antonio Guterres, for his continued support to landlocked developing countries and for constantly raising the needs of landlocked developing countries.
In his speech, Foreign Minister Mnatsakanyan touched upon the new challenges faced by landlocked countries due to the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that within the framework of the global restrictive measures the landlocked developing countries encountered greater limitations on sustainable and inclusive growth. In the context of international cooperation towards mitigating the consequences of the pandemic on landlocked countries, the Foreign Minister of Armenia highlighted the importance of the Vienna Action Plan and the roadmap for its accelerated implementation.
“In this year of global turbulence, major grievances, anxieties and fears, the international community has a historic opportunity to lay the groundwork for meaningful change and to build back better. The risks posed by the COVID-19 have demonstrated that, for the response and recovery efforts to be effective, they need to focus on tackling inequalities, discrimination and lack of inclusion, otherwise, the gaps are likely to remain and increase. It is important that, together with the disruptions caused by the pandemic, we also look at the pre-existing barriers to development- blockades, unduly discriminating trade regimes and unilateral coercive measures are detrimental to sustainable development and inconsistent with the response and recovery efforts. They undermine not only regional development but peace and security.
It is almost three decades that Turkey has been denying the right of Armenia to access to and from sea by closing ...
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