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| Slovakia's National Assembly Speaker Andrej Danko |
Slovakia wants to intensify parliamentary collaboration with Korea, which is a symbol of success for the Central European country, says Slovakia's National Assembly Speaker Andrej Danko.
Danko, who arrived in Seoul Monday for the second Meeting of Speakers of Eurasian Countries Parliaments, stressed the importance of achieving intensive cooperation in diverse areas including research and development and digitization based on strong economic ties.
"Slovakia has the largest volume of investments (circa 2.3 billion euros) and the largest volume of trade (more than 4 billion euros) with Korea among all Central European countries," Danko told The Korea Times.
He believed bilateral relations were friendly and constructive, accompanied by mutually beneficial cooperation based on shared values, with full respect to cultural heritage and its specifics. The two countries established diplomatic ties in 1993.
The parliament speakers' meeting on June 26 to 28 with the theme "Promotion of Inter-Parliamentary Cooperation for Common Prosperity in the Europe-Asia Region" aimed to add value by developing the parliamentary dimension of Europe-Asia cooperation, which has been missing up to now, Danko said.
He stressed that as a European Union member since 2004, Slovakia believed it was important to seize all available tools to reduce tension between North Korea and South Korea as soon as possible and then to begin talks on freezing and dismantling North Korea's nuclear program.
"Let me assure [you] that one of Slovakia's foreign policy objectives, like the EU was a stable, secure and prosperous Korean Peninsula," Danko said.
"We welcome and support any step related to confidence or building trust."
Denuclearization — in a complete, verifiable and irreversible manner — is a key prerequisite to the peninsula's stability, he said.
"We strictly condemn all nuclear and ballistic missile tests of the North Korea regime, we consistently follow the sanction regime and whenever possible call on Pyongyang to meet its obligations to abide by U.N. Security Council resolutions."
The second Eurasia Parliamentary Speakers' meeting, jointly established by South Korea and Russian parliamentary speakers, has invited parliamentary leaders and speakers from 41 countries in the region.
The inaugural meeting was held in Moscow last year.
