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Last Updated: Jun 21, 2017 - 12:57:54 AM |
 The
Eighth Summit of the Americas, which will be held in Lima, Peru, in
April 2018, will have Democratic Governance against Corruption as its
core theme, announced the Peruvian foreign minister, Ricardo Luna, at
the forty-seventh regular session of the OAS General Assembly currently
under way in Cancún, Mexico.
Luna made the announcement at the first ministerial meeting of the
Summit Implementation Review Group (SIRG). The minister said that the
preparations for the coming summit were an opportunity “to reflect on
democratic governance and how it is impacted by corruption,” as well as
“to evaluate concrete measures to combat impunity through regional
cooperation.”
The Peruvian foreign minister proposed supplementing and
bolstering existing mechanisms and instruments of the inter-American
system, such as the Inter-American Convention against Corruption and its
follow-up mechanism (MESICIC). Peru announced that it would “pursue
efforts in partnership with all the countries of the Hemisphere, so that
the Lima Summit will help to strengthen existing mechanisms by making
them more effective and, where appropriate, institute new ones needed to
address this fundamental challenge.”
OAS Secretary General, Luis Almagro, said that next year’s summit
offers an opportunity “for us to agree at the highest level on the
measures that our region needs to guide it toward the consolidation on a
day-to-day level of the values and principles that bind our countries
together in democracy and human rights.”
“The future of the region stands at a critical juncture because of
the threats to democratic governance, whether from the corruption that
is eating away at institutions from within in several countries, or
because they have been turned into empty shells by an authoritarian
regime that curtails the individual guarantees and freedoms of citizens,
as is currently the case in Venezuela,” he added.
The venue of the next Summit of the Americas, a periodic gathering
of the Heads of State and Government of the Hemisphere’s countries, was
determined at the Seventh Summit, which was held in Panama in 2015.
© Copyright 2017 by thebahamasweekly.com
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