Bernardino León presents the Asia-Pacific 2006 Annual (2007 Edition)

Bernardino León, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, announced at the Miraflores Palace in Madrid that Spain is planning to open embassies in Dacca (Bangladesh), Colombo (Sri Lanka) and Phnom Penh (Cambodia), as a result of which the government will have increased the number of Spanish delegations in the Asia-Pacific region to 17. León, who added that the two new embassies which the current government has already opened in Kabul (Afghanistan) and Wellington (New Zealand) are now “fully operative”, made these declarations during the presentation of the Asia-Pacific 2006 Annual (2007 Edition), a publication created jointly by the CIDOB Foundation, Casa Asia and the Real Instituto Elcano, and which this year celebrates its third edition. 

Other participants at the event included Narcís Serra, President of the CIDOB Foundation, Jesús Sanz, Director General of Casa Asia and Antonio de Oyarzábal, Vice-President of the Real Instituto Elcano. The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs declared that during its term of office, the current Spanish government has situated this region in the place that it deserves, and that it has shown that the challenge of Asia is one that can no longer be ignored. 

Jesús Sanz, Director General of Casa Asia, who closed the presentation, paid particular emphasis to the indispensable socio-cultural content of the publication: “The annual includes a complete cultural cartography of the Asia-Pacific area, as well as a comparative section for the West”. Sanz also announced that an observatory was to be created focusing on Central Asia; promoted by the CIDOB Foundation, Casa Asia and the Real Instituto Elcano, the body would cover a wide range of issues related with the region, paying particular attention to the business sphere. Meanwhile, Antonio de Oyarzábal, Vice-President of the Real Instituto Elcano and ex-ambassador for Spain to Japan, spoke of the Cervantes Institute’s long struggle in Asia, and the recent opening of offices in Tokyo, Beijing and New Delhi. “The world today is increasingly smaller, increasingly global. We feel this with every step we take. In fact, Asia is becoming an ever more important factor in our everyday lives”. 

The Asia-Pacific Annual was first published three years ago, in the wake of the growing interest in the region in Spain and Latin America, and with the aim of filling a gap that existed in specialist publications in Spanish. The Annual, a tool that analyses the Asia-Pacific region from a multidisciplinary perspective, is divided into five complementary sections: politics, security, economy, culture and society. Each section is accompanied by appendices that include chronologies of the main events, a section of maps and files on each country, as well as the more than 200 statistical indicators included in the section The Asia-Pacific region in figures. >> See press release for the presentation of the Asia-Pacific 2006 Annual (2007 Edition)