The Secretary-General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Kao Kim Hourn, will visit the central headquarters of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Santiago, Chile, this Thursday, September 5, in the context of his first official tour of the South American country.
The high-level official will meet with the United Nations regional organization’s Executive Secretary, José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, and afterwards, at 4:30 p.m. local time (GMT -4), he will give a keynote lecture about multilateral relations between Asian nations and Latin American and Caribbean countries, in which he will discuss opportunities for furthering international trade between the two blocs.
After the welcome remarks by ECLAC’s Executive Secretary, the event’s attendees will be addressed by the Undersecretary for International Economic Relations at Chile’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Claudia Sanhueza Riveros.
This activity is being organized jointly with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Undersecretariat for International Economic Relations, represented respectively by the Director of Asia-Pacific, Ambassador Pablo Arriarán Ahumada, and the Head of the Asia and Oceania Department of the Undersecretariat’s Bilateral General-Directorate, Pablo Urria Hering.
It is worth recalling that Chile was the second country in the world, after Germany, to obtain the status of “Development Partner” of ASEAN, a decision adopted at the organization’s 34th Summit held in Bangkok in 2019. The Association is made up of Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam, with a population of over 650 million inhabitants.
The delegation accompanying ASEAN’s Secretary-General will be composed of the Director of the External Relations Directorate of the ASEAN Political-Security Community Department, Mr. Bala Kumar Palaniappan; Director of the Head of Executive Support Division in the Office of the Secretary-General, Mr. Dara Lux; Senior Officer from the External Relations Division 1 of the ASEAN Political-Security Community Department, Ms. Desy Nurmala Dewi; and the Senior Officer from the Executive Support Division in the Office of the Secretary-General, Mr. A. Ibrahim Almuttaqi.
Participating in the meeting along with ECLAC’s Executive Secretary will be Luis Fidel Yáñez, the Secretary of the Commission; Keiji Inoue, Officer-in-Charge of ECLAC’s International Trade and Integration Division; and Silvia Hernandez, the Chief of Staff of the Office of the Executive Secretary.
After the keynote lecture by Kao Kim Hourn, there will be a question-and-answer session with those attending the event, which will include representatives of the diplomatic corps accredited in Chile, members of other United Nations System organizations with a presence in the country, authorities from regional and international bodies, academics and other special guests.
Journalists and other members of the press are invited to follow the ASEAN Secretary-General’s keynote lecture live at https://live.cepal.org/asean/ and via ECLAC’s institutional accounts on X (https://x.com/cepal_onu) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/cepal.onu).
What: Keynote lecture by Kao Kim Hourn, Secretary-General of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), at ECLAC.
When: Thursday, September 5, 2024, 4:30 p.m. local time in Chile (GMT -4).
Who:
Where: ECLAC’s headquarters in Santiago, Chile (Av. Dag Hammarskjöld 3477, Vitacura).
Also by virtual connection via various platforms:
For queries related to journalistic coverage of this event, contact ECLAC’s Public Information Unit in Santiago, Chile. Email: prensa@cepal.org; Telephone: (56) 22210 2040.
