 We're very happy to have today Ambassador Pedro Burriand, who is EU Special Representative to Central Asia, to speak about the European Union and Central Asia, a new partnership in action. I was telling Ambassador Burriand before we began that we very much welcome his presence here as a way of raising consciousness in public opinion here on this, what might seem a rather exotic area, which is a very important area geostrategically and otherwise. He is coming after the Union has adopted a position on the question, on the basis of a joint communication of the Council on the Commission on EU Central Asia, in which I cite one of the statements in the joint communication. It says that the area is an increasingly strategic location at the crossroads of Europe and Asia with a young population, high literacy rates and abundant natural resources, which has significant growth and development potential. I think that in a nutshell describes the potential and the importance of this area. There are lots of other considerations which no doubt Ambassador Burriand will go into in making his presentation. His presentation will be on the record, he will speak for maybe about 20 minutes. Yes, I will try. Questions or comments afterwards will be off the record under Europe House rules. You may cite what is said here but not the person or the place where it is said. Ambassador Burriand. Thank you Ambassador, thank you for your nice words of welcome. For me it's really a pleasure to be in Dublin and discuss Central Asia. Here I wanted to once again thank the Institute for International and European Affairs for convening this discussion and I agree that we cannot have a better timing for this discussion since we just a few days ago adopted Council conclusions endorsing the new strategy for Central Asia and I'm pleased to note that the attention and interest in the region of our member states is growing significantly. It has been growing for more than four years since a very active Latvian presidency which brought Central Asia back to our radar screen but also it's growing because of many important things and developments happening in the region and I have to say that the Central Asian region is not really in focus of our attention because of any kind of crisis or conflict but on the contrary because of positive developments in the region and I also believe that these positive developments can be also attributed and credited also to use long term support and investment into the sustainable development of the region and support for regional cooperation as factors of security and stability. In particular as I mentioned in this past couple of years Central Asia has gone through significant changes which have brought the region closer than ever to Europe and have increased the geostrategic significance of the region for us for the European Union and I would mention a couple of those positive dynamics that we see in Central Asia and that have opened up new opportunities for taking the EU Central Asia partnership and relationship forward to a qualitatively new level. First of all it's reform and modernization processes in the region in particular I would say in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan of course Kazakhstan has been involved in those reform processes under 100 steps program for several years already and those reform processes have triggered cause also for political recognition and support from the EU and of course while Central Asians will need to decide their own ways of working together there is also a new momentum in regional cooperation illustrated by the first informal consultative summit of Central Asian leaders in March 2018 in Astana and hopefully the next summit will be organized this year in Tashkent it was slightly postponed because of the elections in Astana in Nur Sultan and I hope that really also the summits are showing the understanding of Central Asian countries that in spite of their different interests different ambitions different also models of building their statehoods the regional cooperation is a must and is contributing to solutions to common challenges and also I would mention a couple of geo-strategic geopolitical developments we are not hiding that also our interest to the region has increased also thanks to more engagement of China through its Belt and Road initiative but we also understood that European Union has to come with its own concept in promoting your Asian connectivity and as you know just in September 2018 we adopted our own strategy on connecting Europe and Asia actually presenting our views and approaches to a sustainable way of connecting Europe and Asia and it was met with quite a strong interest not only by our partners but also by China where we also established EU-China connectivity platform for discussing various projects together but also we are using this platform for encouraging China to behave in a more sustainable manner and more open manner when pursuing a Belt and Road initiative but once again it's a process and we hope that our 25 years experience from building connectivity in our single market and with our neighborhood has already accumulated a lot of experience but also we are one of the strongest source of financing for those projects so I believe here we can also build something we can call a partnership for sustainable connectivity with Central Asia as part of our strategy and also we are quite pleased to note that Central Asians are quite eager to take their own responsibility for certain things happening in the region including security including fight against radicalization leading to violent extremism including also contribution to hopefully helping Afghanistan to stabilize and find the solution for its protected conflict and you see also a very strong initiative of Kazakhstan bringing up the topic of regional security including Afghanistan to the program of the security council you see initiatives of Uzbekistan presented in Samarkand in Tashkent conference and this also creates a new kind of level of cooperation not only working and helping Central Asian countries in their sustainable development but working together in addressing many important regional and also global challenges including the impact of climate change and many other other things but I do not want to sound complacent we clearly see also many outstanding challenges in the region these are connected or not connected also with the challenges I mentioned which will see shrinking space for civil society sometimes lack of respect for basic freedoms including freedom of expression or assembly and sometimes quite heavy-handed approaches of law enforcement services even against peaceful demonstrators I think really the threats which the region and individual countries are facing and we are out loud saying it should not be a reason why you should slow down the process of reforms or slowing down opening up the societies or providing more freedoms to their citizens on the contrary I think if you have this kind of heavy-handed approaches sometimes you trigger even more negative reactions and the EU within our platforms for bilateral and regional dialogues we have dialogues on human rights we have also platform for rule of law cooperation we are trying to be very open and also sharing our experience how these elements were so important for us let's say four countries of Central Eastern Europe in our transformation processes so I think this is also something which represents certain change we are not trying to teach our citizens but we are trying to actually by experience sharing to demonstrate a practical value of those challenges these countries are facing over the lunch we had quite an interesting discussion about the experience actually the history of Central Asian countries for five years it's nothing in the history but the progress is enormous but once again we should not forget that there are many important challenges including those which I mentioned neighboring Afghanistan growing potential for radicalization but also that there are actually a million of young people entering the labor market every year can you imagine this kind of labor force entering the labor market every year out of it probably this year is the most kind of fertile in Uzbekistan it's 800,000 young people entering the labor market so it's both a blessing but it is also a challenge when these young people are not provided job opportunities then they can be ruled by radicals by extremists recruited but also they can become a source of irregular migration so far Russia is absorbing a big portion of this labor migration but I see that the absorption capacity of Russia is reaching or has reached also the limit it was quite interesting that last week I visited Russia I met with Deputy Minister Karasin and he said we have four million labor migrants he was quite positive about the contribution of these labor migrants to the economic development but also that actually those labor migrants are transferring money remittances to their own countries and supporting in a way economic development but I think there could be also a way how to secure this wonderful young potential by creating job opportunities inside of their countries and certainly this is one of our ambitions to contribute to that through certain priorities which are reflected in our strategy now very briefly about the strategy and I would be very much eager to listen to your comments and questions the strategy which was adopted on 17th of June I believe was done in the most transparent manner we were involved in a large consultation process with our partners in Central Asia over two years involving governments civil society private sector but also our member states and private sector we wanted to be sure that the picture we have about the needs expectations and priorities of our partners about expectations of our member states are correctly and precisely reflected in the strategy I do not want to claim that we have a perfect strategy but certainly according to first reactions from member states from the region the strategy is appreciated as less ambitious ambitious and more realistic better focus on the needs of our partners in the region and better reflecting and mobilizing our sources and resources for implementing the strategy of course the strategy will be then translated into the future programming actually we are starting the preparation of a new budget or new multi-annual indicative program for 2021-27 where the strategy will be a very important political guidance for allocating the money I'm not promising that we'll allocate much more money but certainly the commitments of the EU to increase the financing of foreign action in the next budget by 30% is an encouraging signal I think also with the level of allocations we have allocated for the previous planning period more than 1.2 billion euros for various bilateral and regional projects and programs in those key areas rule of law of education education is the most significant program but also supporting more sustainable management of natural resources and also we are looking to the same priorities but adding more focus also on economic aspects including building ground or rules based space for a more attractive investment environment for those connectivity projects to be achievable and environmentally also sustainable so we are now also based on the demand from our partners for a more ambitious economic presence of the EU in the region strengthening mechanisms for supporting investments including investment for facility for Central Asia which is a source of grants which could be combined with loans of different financial institutions we are very much encouraging EIB to increase the activities in the region also because of these emerging opportunities currently EIB is falling behind its expectations and potential as the biggest investment bank but we hope that also by improving and creating better conditions for investments and their production of protection the interest of EIB, EBRD will be only growing but once again we believe that certain homework should be done also by our partners in those areas fighting corruption, good governance, access to justice and these are key elements of the improved environment and when I am discussing these elements also of connectivity with our Chinese partners they clearly recognize the importance of fighting corruption and rule of law is also important elements for liability of their Belt and Road initiative programs so I believe we have certain convergence of views also in this area and once again we hope to work in promoting sustainable way of connectivity addressing also issues like unsustainable debt or poor quality of projects so I guess I spoke a lot but I haven't mentioned actually the key two priorities of the strategy or three if you wish but you can find the strategy it's accessible including also council conclusions on our website so our strategy is divided into two priorities supporting and building partnership for resilience it's very much connected with something which I mentioned in the beginning these enormous challenges and precious our partners are finding themselves because of the climate change because of a lack of connectivity and I think our kind of primary goal is to help in strengthening capacities of our partners in Central Asia in absorbing and resisting and responding to these external and internal shocks again through education through job creation through reforms and second very important priority is very much connected also with the first one but also with more economic focus is the partnership for resilience where we also as I mentioned will be very much focused on supporting private sector development improvement of investment climate business environment job creation and also creating better conditions for sustainable connectivity once again these priorities will be translated into our programs but probably since I spoke for too long already I would stop here and open up for your questions or comments if any