- Saturday, April 27, 2024
Three Asian countries are among the six new entrants.
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE BRICS group of nations, which were reportedly finding it challenging to arrive at a consensus over the bloc’s expansion, has decided at the ongoing summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, to invite six more countries to become its new members.
The new countries are Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The announcement was made by South African president Cyril Ramaphosa on Thursday (24), the concluding day of the three-day summit. He said it at a joint media briefing with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, Chinese president Xi Jinping and Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
The new membership will take effect on January 1, 2024, Ramaphosa added.
He said the decision on the new members were agreed upon after firming up the guiding principles, criteria and procedures for the expansion process.
“We have consensus on the first phase of this BRICS expansion process,” Ramaphosa said at the end of the grouping’s summit in Johannesburg.
“We have decided to invite Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to become full members of BRICS,” he said.
“We value the interests of other countries in building partnership with BRICS and have tasked our foreign ministers to further develop the BRICS partnership model and list of prospective countries (which want to join the grouping),” Ramaphosa said.
This is the second time that BRICS will witness an expansion. The only time when it saw an expansion in the past was in 2010 when South Africa was added as the fifth member. The name of the bloc was originally BRIC after the four founding members of Brazil, Russia, India and China before the African nation’s entry to become BRICS.
(With PTI inputs)
