The first step towards the formation of the Council occurred in 1991 when eight Arctic countries signed the Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy (AEPS). The Ottawa Declaration of 1996 formally established the Arctic Council as a high level intergovernmental forum to provide a means for promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic States, with the involvement of the Arctic Indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues, in particular issues of sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic. The Ottawa Declaration named eight members of the Arctic Council: Canada, Russia, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, The United States, Sweden and Finland. The Arctic Council has conducted several studies on climate change, oil and gas, and Arctic shipping.
World Trade Organization
The World Trade Organization (WTO) is an organization that intends to supervise and liberalize international trade. The organization officially commenced on January 1, 1995 under the Marrakech Agreement, replacing the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), which commenced in 1948. The organization deals with regulation of trade between participating countries; it provides a framework for negotiating and formalizing trade agreements, and a dispute resolution process aimed at enforcing participants' adherence to WTO agreements which are signed by representatives of member governments and ratified by their parliaments. Most of the issues that the WTO focuses on derive from previous trade negotiations, especially from the Uruguay Round (1986-1994).
The organization is currently endeavoring to persist with a trade negotiation called the Doha Development Agenda (or Doha Round), which was launched in 2001 to enhance equitable participation of poorer countries which represent a majority of the world's population. However, the negotiation has been dogged by "disagreement between exporters of agricultural bulk commodities and countries with large numbers of subsistence farmers on the precise terms of a 'special safeguard measure' to protect farmers from surges in imports. At this time, the future of the Doha Round is uncertain."
GUAM Organization for Democracy and Economic Development
Cooperation between Georgia, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, and Moldova started with the GUAM consultative forum, established on October 10, 1997, in Strasbourg and named after the initial letters of each of those countries. In 1999, the organisation was renamed GUUAM due to the membership of Uzbekistan. A summit in Yalta on June 6 to June 7, 2001, was accompanied by the signing of GUUAM's charter which formalized the organization. However in 2002, Uzbekistan announced that it planned to withdraw from the organization, and following this announcement started to ignore GUUAM summits and meetings. On May 24, 2005, shortly after the Andijan massacre, Uzbekistan finally gave an official notice of withdrawal from the organization to the Moldovan presidency, thus changing the group's name back to GUAM.
In the years following the signing of its charter the grouping was generally considered to have stagnated: Among other things, the 2004 meeting in Yalta was only attended by two of the five leaders while the GUUAM official website still showed the old Georgian flag and listed Uzbekistan as a member.
16.06.2007 GUAM Secretariat in Kyiv hosted the UNODC Workshop on Nuclear Terrorism The experts informed the participants of the Workshop on recent developments in global counter-terrorism legal framework, the UN instruments in the area of international legal cooperation in countering terrorism, the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and other legal aspects of nuclear security, practical issues in the area of international cooperation related to mutual legal assistance and extradition, the human rights aspects of international cooperation in combating terrorism, lessons learned and obstacles encountered in this area, and Illicit Trafficking Database (ITDB).
16.06.2007 Meeting of the Working Group on Combating Terrorism The meeting was held under the presidency of a new Chairman of the WGCTOC, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Georgia Mr. Georgiy Lordkipanidze with the participation also of Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of the Republic of Azerbaijan Mr. Vilayat Eyvazov, Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine Mr. Vasiliy Marmazov, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Moldova Mr. Nikolay Gumenny, and GUAM Secretary General Ambassador Valery Chechelashvili.
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