Home Secretary Ghimire will lead Nepali delegation at the Home Ministerial level meeting as Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Bijaya Kumar Gachchhadar expressed his inability to make it to the meeting citing poor health. [break]Ghimire will also lead the Nepali delegation at the secretary-level meeting scheduled a day before the ministerial meeting.
The Nepali delegation includes Joint Secretaries Shankar Koirala and Suresh Adhikari (Home Ministry), Joint Secretary Arjun Bahadur Thapa (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and Under Secretary at Home Ministry Dilip Pokharel. The delegation will return home on September 29.
Shankar Koirala, who is also the spokesman of the Home Ministry, said terrorism, cross-broader crimes, women and child trafficking and drug smuggling and measures to curb those crimes in SAARC countries will be discussed at the meeting.
The meeting will also review the progress made and the difficulties seen in the implementation of the SAARC Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism and its Additional Protocol.
The SAARC Home Ministerial level meeting was started after Additional Protocol to the SAARC Regional Convention on Suppression of Terrorism came into force on January 12, 2006. The Home Secretary level meeting will set agenda for the discussions and endorsement in the Home Ministerial level meeting, sources said.
While the first such meeting was held in Dhaka in May, 2006, the second meeting was held in New Delhi in October, 2007 to review the progress in the implementation of the Convention and its Additional Protocol. The third and fourth Home Ministerial level meetings were hosted by Pakistan and Bhutan respectively.
Related story
As SAARC Turns Forty…
