UK to host G-7, Asean ministers' meeting in Dec
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LONDON • Britain will host foreign and development ministers from the Group of Seven (G-7) industrialised nations and from Asean at a summit in Liverpool between Dec 10 and 12.
The three-day summit will address issues including economic resilience post-Covid-19, global health and human rights, Britain's Foreign Office said in a statement yesterday.
The meeting will help to build "closer economic, technology and security ties globally", said the United Kingdom's Foreign Secretary Liz Truss in the statement.
Among the ministers due to attend are those from Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, it said, and reflected "the UK's growing Indo-Pacific tilt".
This was the first inclusion of ministers from Asean countries at a G-7 foreign ministers' summit.
Britain holds the rotating presidency of the G-7 this year and has already hosted the COP climate summit in Glasgow this month, as well as the G-7 leaders' summit in the British seaside village of Carbis Bay in June.
The Liverpool meeting followed a meeting of G-7 foreign ministers in London in May, the statement said, that included representatives from Australia, India, South Korea and South Africa.
"These nations collectively represent a broader geographic spread of countries committed to reforming and safeguarding the international order in which economies can flourish," the Foreign Office statement said.
Meanwhile, Australia yesterday formally embarked on a hotly contested programme to equip its navy with nuclear-powered submarines in a new defence alliance with Britain and the United States.
Defence Minister Peter Dutton joined US and British diplomats in Sydney to sign an agreement allowing the exchange of sensitive "naval nuclear propulsion information" among the nations, Agence France-Presse reported.
It is the first agreement on the technology to be publicly signed since the three countries announced in September the formation of a defence alliance, Aukus, to confront strategic tensions in the Pacific where China-US rivalry is growing.
