DOHA: The Cabinet yesterday approved plans to host this October a second meeting of GCC ministers in charge of tourism promotion in their countries.
The first meeting was held in Kuwait last October and agreed in principle to launch a joint GCC tourist visa system. The proposed system is to target expatriates in the member states as beneficiaries on an experimental basis for security reasons.
The idea is to boost tourism in the region. Qatar News Agency (QNA) reports that the next meeting will be held here.
It didn’t cite the agenda of the meeting but it is expected that the ministers might finalise the proposed regional visa regime.
Assistant Undersecretary at Kuwait’s Commerce Ministry, Sameera Al Ghareeb, had, however, told the media after last year’s meeting that one should not expect the regional visa system to be implemented soon since the interior ministers of the member-states needed to look into security aspects.
QNA reported that, as is customary, a meeting of undersecretaries from the GCC tourism ministries, or undersecretaries at other ministries in-charge of tourism, will be held here before the ministerial meeting.
The undersecretary-level meeting will be held in the second quarter of October. The ministerial meeting is also likely to take up the issue, among others, of private sector participation in tourism projects in the member states. The GCC states set up a joint committee to promote tourism in their territories and it is the panel’s idea that tourism ministers meet every year to mull ways to promote tourism.
At its weekly session chaired by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs H E Ahmed bin Abdullah bin Zaid Al Mahmoud at Emiri Diwan, the Cabinet took measures to issue a draft law amending some provisions of Law Number 2 of 2011 concerning official statistics. The Cabinet was briefed on the recommendations of the Advisory Council on the draft law before it took measures.
The Cabinet approved renewal of the membership to the Board of Directors of Qatar Financial Centre Regulatory Authority “as of 3/8/2015”, QNA reports.
It approved hosting the first meeting of a Qatar-Cyprus joint committee for economic and technical cooperation here early next month. The Peninsula
