- Djoomart Otorbaev, former prime minister of the Kyrgyz Republic

- The Shanghai Cooperation Organization is clearly one of the biggest success stories of multilateral cooperation. After 17 years of development, it now has eight members, four observers, and six partners for dialogue which is a great success. It means that the Shanghai Spirit, which is the spirit of mutual trust, has brought to this club more countries of Europe and Asia, and perhaps the SCO will grow even bigger.

The core of the Shanghai Spirit is the mutual trust between countries which is historically hard to achieve and thus has become the remarkable achievement of the SCO. The SCO set an example by bringing harmony among its members and has built it into the biggest regional organization in the world in terms of population, land, and even in economy. Unfortunately, countries in today’s world don’t trust each other. So this spirit should be maintained in the future as a guiding principle on how multilateral cooperation should behave.