PlanetNext

Vietnamese Prime Minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, will deliver the keynote address at the 12th IISS Asia Security Summit (1), also called the Shangri-La Dialogue, which will convene in Singapore from 31 May to Jun 2. The meeting is “a Track One security summit which brings together defense ministers, armed forces’ commanders, and the most senior [...]

Discussions and debates during the one-day workshop – ‘Sovereignty over Paracel and Spratly Archipelagos: Historical and Legal Aspects’ – held in the Quang Ngai province at the end of April and organized by the Pham Van Dong University focused mostly on two topics related to the South China Sea issue: historical and legal aspects over the sovereignty [...]

Quang Ngai – “In South China Sea—East Sea as referred by the Vietnamese–China is unable to present historical evidence of its claim. Its territory was historically limited to Hainan island, thus Chinese used force to illegally occupy rocks, features and islands in the Paracel and Spratly archipelagos”. With these remarks, Prof. Pham Dang Phuoc, Rector [...]

Enhancing cooperation between ASEAN and the EU in the name of sustainable development and prosperity was the focus of the third EU ASEAN business summit held in Hanoi in-mid March and attended by ASEAN Secretary-General Le Luong Minh, EU Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht, Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung, Minister of Industry and Trade Vu [...]

A proposed free-trade agreement (FTA) between the European Union and Vietnam promises to bolster already fast-rising bilateral trade. While both sides agree an FTA would on the whole be mutually beneficial, negotiations will likely be complicated by the potential socio-economic impacts a pact would have on Vietnam’s fragile transitional economy. Negotiations, which started last June, [...]

Vietnam’s Party General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong paid official visits to Belgium, the European Union (EU) institutions, Italy, and the United Kingdom from January 17 to 24 with the aim to forge and reinforce economic and political relations. Among the others, Trong was accompanied by Vietnamese Minister of Planning and Investment Bui Quang Vinh. During [...]

The Mekong is at risk. The world’s 12th-longest river and the 7th-longest in Asia, vital for millions of people living in Tibet, China’s Yunnan province, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam is threatened by the energy needs of the South East Asian region. China began to build its first dam on the Mekong River in [...]

Last month’s Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit held in Phnom Penh opened with high expectations and closed with an ambivalence that has cast new doubts on the 10-member grouping’s common destiny. While the controversy over competing territorial claims in the South China Sea issue was the most obvious point of tension, the lack [...]