Brussels, Belgium. President Nikos Christodoulides will meet United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres next week, with the meeting expected to take place on the sidelines of the European Council summit. Government spokesman Konstantinos Letymbiotis said the meeting is scheduled for next Wednesday.
Meeting timing and purpose
Letymbiotis said the meeting is “part of the clear and firm political will of President Christodoulides to resume negotiations on the Cyprus issue”. He added that it also confirms the “firm and continuous interest” of Guterres in the Cyprus problem “in a period of intense geopolitical developments”.
Position on restarting talks
Letymbiotis said the Greek Cypriot side’s willingness to restart negotiations is “a given”, adding that talks should resume from where they stopped in Crans-Montana in 2017 and be geared towards a bizonal, bicommunal, federal solution.
Enlarged meeting proposal
He said an enlarged meeting involving the island’s two sides, the UN, and the guarantor powers Greece, Turkey and the United Kingdom “can act as a catalyst for achieving substantial progress”. He said the Greek Cypriot side is ready to attend such a meeting so that all aspects of the Cyprus problem can be discussed and conditions created to restart substantive negotiations.
Confidence-building measures and recent contacts
UN envoy Maria Angela Holguin said in January that no enlarged meeting could be held until there are further “results on the confidence-building measures” between the two sides. Since then, Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhurman met last month without the presence of the UN for the first time, but no concrete results were achieved.
Previous talks with Guterres
Next week’s meeting comes a month after Erhurman met Guterres in New York, after which Erhurman said that regarding talks to resolve the Cyprus problem, “this time it must be different”.
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