Kyrgyzstan says ready to sign new cooperation agreement with EU

BISHKEK. Jan 19 (Interfax) - Kyrgyzstan is ready to sign a new agreement on enhanced cooperation with the European Union, Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Jeenbek Kulubayev said at a press conference on Thursday.

"It is possible we will sign it this year; there is an outstanding technical issue. For our part, we are ready to sign the agreement," Kulubayev said in response to Interfax's question.

"We were planning to sign the new agreement with the EU in December 2022 yet the European side asked for a time-out, as each of 27 member states must sign the document separately in accordance with new EU regulations. We asked them to hold negotiations and put the documents in order," Kulubayev said.

An agreement on cooperation with the United States is still being worked on, the minister said. "There is no exact date of the document's signing just yet. We will sign as soon as we agree on details which meet the interests of both sides," he said.

Kyrgyzstan and the EU started to negotiate the new agreement in 2017. The new document was initialed in July 2019. It is supposed to replace the current Partnership and Cooperation Agreement that took effect in 1999. The new agreement will focus on political cooperation, trade, investments, economic cooperation promoting sustainable development, and other aspects of bilateral relations.

Kyrgyzstan unilaterally denounced the cooperation agreement with the United States signed in 1993 in 2015 in protest against the U.S. State Department's Human Rights Award bestowed on human rights activist Azimzhan Askarov, who was sentenced to life imprisonment in Kyrgyzstan for organizing unrest and complicity in the murder of a law enforcement officer in June 2010.

The U.S. authorities have repeatedly expressed the readiness to sign a new cooperation agreement with Kyrgyzstan.