BELARUS NEWS AND ANALYSIS

DATE:

18/06/2009

Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus inform WTO on suspension of talks

MOSCOW, June 18 (Itar-Tass) - The delegations of Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan, which are currently in Geneva, have informed the World Trade Organization on the suspension of individual talks on WTO membership.

"Yesterday WTO received an unofficial, verbal notification on the suspension of talks for the time which is necessary for holding consultations," the head of the department for trade negotiations of the Russian Ministry for Economic Development, Maxim Medvedkov, told Tass by telephone on Thursday.

"We have not sent any official papers as of yet, some time is needed for this," he noted. "But we are not in a hurry, and nobody is pressing us," he said.

According to him, for an official notification "it is necessary to weigh all steps, coordinate details concerning the new form and content of Customs Union's entry into WTO, and this takes not a day or two or three".

The new union which will represent the interests of three states "is a complex legal construction, and there have been no standards of this kind in the history of WTO, as no country has withdrawn from the process of joining as of yet and none union of countries has joined it," he stressed.

But "we have a task - to maximally conserve the results of previous talks, reached mainly by Russia and Kazakhstan, on which many years and efforts have been spent, and which we don't want to give up," Medvedkov said. "We are not conducting negotiations on the basis of enthusiasm and emotions. The governments have set us a task and we are implementing it," he stressed.

"And this is a long, painstaking and technically difficult work on settling concrete issues," he added.

Source:

http://www.itar-tass.com/eng/level2.html?NewsID=14062820&PageNum=0

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