Current affairs

I am highly satisfied with our meeting, where cooperation in the Barents region took concrete steps forward, Foreign Minister Ilkka Kanerva stated at the press conference following the Barents Euro-Arctic Council meeting in Rovaniemi on 15 November. The meeting confirmed the establishment of a permanent international Barents Secretariat at Kirkenes, Norway. At the meeting, Kanerva also handed the Council chairman’s gavel over to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov of Russia.

Discussions among the Foreign Ministers of the Nordic countries, which took place in connection with a session of the Nordic Council, were held in a highly positive and open atmosphere, said Foreign Minister Ilkka Kanerva, who chaired the meeting in Oslo on Wednesday, 31 October. The main topics of the Foreign Ministers’ meeting were regional cooperation in the North and the Baltic Sea region.

In his visit to Denmark on 8 October, Foreign Minister Ilkka Kanerva had a varied agenda ranging from politics to culture; the topics discussed extended from the Finnish chairmanship of the OSCE in 2008 to the possibilities for Denmark to serve as Finnish artists’ springboard to the world. Kanerva met with his Danish colleague and with the Secretary General of the Secretariat for the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly and the leadership of the Cultural Institute of Finland in Copenhagen and Finpro.

Finland's new Minister for Nordic Cooperation Jan Vapaavuori hosted his first Nordic Cooperation Ministers' meeting on the 13th of June at Koli, Finland only a few days after his nomination for the ministerial post.