Armenia insists that the new Secretary General of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) be elected by consensus and believes that it is not necessary to speed up this process.
“The CSTO is based on the principle of making consensus decisions acceptable to all. It’s not about speeding up or slowing down certain processes, but improving the organization’s effectiveness by making decisions acceptable to all, eliminating situations that have no legal regulation,” said Armenian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Anna Naghdalyan in an interview with TASS, commenting on the Belarusian MFA’s call to speed up the process of appointing a new CSTO Secretary General.
According to the spokesperson, “during our membership in the CSTO, we have emphasized the important role of the organization in the security system of Armenia, therefore our priority is to increase its authority and efficiency through discussion and close cooperation.” “Through this prism, it is necessary to consider the step of Armenia aimed at separating this structure from the internal legal issues of the country,” Naghdalyan added.
- On December 21, 2018, Alyaksandr Lukashenka publicly supported the appointment of Stanislau Zas to the post of Secretary General of the CSTO and signed the corresponding draft of the CSTO Collective Security Council. However, the organization itself has no consensus on this issue.
- Armenia does not agree to the appointment of Zas, because the previous secretary general of the CSTO, the representative of Armenia, Yuri Khachaturov, was withdrawn early. Yerevan believes that an Armenian should be the new secretary of the CSTO until 2020, but the rest of the organization’s countries are confident that a representative of Belarus should be chosen for this position.
- A spokesman for Armenian Prime Minister Arman Yegoyan said on December 21 that Yerevan insists that the CSTO Secretary General be chosen by consensus. The State Secretary of the Security Council of Belarus Stanislau Zas stated that the CSTO Charter provides for the adoption of decisions in a limited format, that is, without the support of all members. But he still hopes to reach a consensus.
