On 25 May Minister of State for Europe Günter Gloser leaves for Hanoi, Viet Nam, where he is due to attend the ASEM Foreign Ministers Meeting. The two-day conference of foreign ministers of the 43 countries participating in ASEM (Asia-Europe Meeting) will focus on efforts to tackle the international financial and economic crisis as well as joint strategies on energy security. Other issues on the agenda are current developments in Europe and Asia, including Myanmar and the Korean Peninsula.

The Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) founded in 1996 is a forum for European-Asian dialogue and cooperation. It enables the EU member states and the European Commission, the 10 ASEAN member states and the ASEAN Secretariat as well as China, Japan, South Korea, India, Pakistan and Mongolia to work together both at the political and the expert level.

Minister of State Gloser will then travel on to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, for a two-day meeting of EU and ASEAN foreign ministers. The issues on the agenda are climate change and the environment, food and energy security, combating terrorism and drug trafficking, disarmament, non-proliferation and the control of small arms.

The meeting is intended to strengthen cooperation between the two regional organizations. This cooperation is based on the Nuremberg Declaration on an EU-ASEAN Enhanced Partnership adopted at the 2007 Foreign Ministers Meeting in Nuremberg. For over 30 years the EU and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have been cooperating at the regional level particularly on economic and development issues.

In the margins of both meetings Günter Gloser will hold political talks with representatives of both host countries as well as other delegations, including with Prof. Nguyen Thien Nhan, Viet Nam's Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education, and with Dr. N. Hassan Wirajuda, the Foreign Minister of Indonesia. Here, too, the issue of what joint line to take towards the Myanmar Government and the demand for Aung San Suu Kyi's immediate release will be among the main topics of discussion.

Read more on Germany's bilateral relations to: