The inaugural European Union — Central Asia summit will be held in Samarkand in April 2025, formalising the C5 + EU cooperation at the highest political level.
Preparations to the high-profile event were discussed during the recent talks between Assistant to the President of Uzbekistan Saida Mirziyoyeva and the EU Ambassador to Uzbekistan Toivo Klaar. The first-ever EU–Central Asia leaders' summit was initially planned for 2024.
“We believe that the upcoming EU-Central Asia summit will significantly strengthen our ties. The new EU leadership is truly committed to expanding relations with Uzbekistan and Central Asia. We are grateful to president Mirziyoyev for proposing Samarkand as the venue for the first-ever EU-Central Asia summit,” the EU ambassador told Gazeta.uz.
In 2019, the EU updated its strategy on Central Asia, to take account of new developments and opportunities for partnership and cooperation – both with the region as a whole and with its five individual countries (C5). The strategy aims to support sustainable development based on democracy, good governance and human rights and to boost trade and investment between the EU and Central Asia.
In 2022 and 2023, the Central Asian Heads of State and the President of the European Council held their first-ever high-level meetings, resulting in the preparation of a further joint roadmap for deepening ties between the EU and Central Asia.
“Intensification of high-level contacts reflects Central Asia's growing geostrategic importance in the light of global developments, including Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the West's withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. The changes generated new challenges in the region have become, at the same time, opportunities for the Central Asian countries to emerge as regional political actors in their own right. They also provide further avenues for partnership and cooperation in areas such as energy, raw materials and connectivity, alongside a focus on human rights and democracy, where issues remain,” -said the European Parliament in its statement.
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