Press Statement of
Secretary for Foreign Affairs H.E. Enrique A. Manalo on the
Visit of Minister for Foreign Affairs of Mongolia
H.E. Battsetseg Batmunkh

Your Excellency,

Ladies and gentlemen of the press, 

Dear colleagues:

It is an honor to welcome Her Excellency Foreign Minister Battsetseg Batmunkh back to Manila.

Minister Battsetseg’s historic trip marks the first official visit by a Mongolian Foreign Minister to the Philippines since 1984. It reciprocates my own historic trip to Ulaanbaatar last year, the first official bilateral visit for a Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary.

I am pleased to have had a productive bilateral meeting with the Foreign Minister this morning, which has led to the issuance of our first bilateral joint statement since 2000. We were joined in this bilateral meeting by the Department of Economy, Economic Planning and Development, formerly NEDA, and by the Technical Education and Skills Development Authority (TESDA). This demonstrates how much potential there is to develop in our bilateral relations.

Through the Foreign Minister, I thanked the Mongolian Government for helping ensure that the rights and welfare of around five hundred Filipinos now living in Mongolia are protected. I discussed with her our desire to forge cooperative frameworks that will better protect Filipinos in Mongolia.

The Philippines and Mongolia are two of the fastest growing economies not only in Asia but in the world. The future of our bilateral partnership finds strength in our two resource-rich economies.

And as middle-income countries, we share an interest in pursuing cooperation to sustain our promising development trajectories. And I thank the Foreign Minister for Mongolia’s participation in the recently-concluded High-Level Conference on Middle-Income Countries held in Manila, which issued the Makati Declaration on Middle-Income Countries.

I have also responded positively to Mongolia’s interest in learning from the Philippines’ experience in the area of regional development and in pursuing English language training for Mongolian civil servants and rural officials in the Philippines.

In this regard, I have just exchanged with Minister Battsetseg diplomatic notes pertaining to a pilot program for Mongolians to study English in the Philippines, which will be organized by the Technical Cooperation Council of the Philippines.

Beyond our economic ties, the Philippines and Mongolia are Asian democracies bound by shared values of freedom, human rights, and the rule of law. In this context, we reaffirmed our shared interest in the evolving Indo-Pacific landscape and in defending the rules-based international order.

As indicated in our joint statement, Foreign Minister Battsetseg and I emphasized the importance of adherence to the United Nations Charter and reaffirmed our commitment to the 1982 Manila Declaration on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes.

We also reaffirmed our commitment to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and to our shared vision of a world free of nuclear weapons.

Just as the Philippines pursues an independent foreign policy, I note with much interest Mongolia’s “Third Neighbor Policy” and the high importance it has been putting on its relations with the Philippines, in its efforts to assert its strategic agency and aspiration, and this is most welcome.

Allow me to close by stressing how pleased I am to be able to reciprocate the warm hospitality that Foreign Minister Battsetseg accorded me and my delegation during my Official Visit to Ulaanbaatar last year.

And I am confident that we can continue to sustain the momentum we have built since our first engagement as Vice Ministers in 2018, and also through our three meetings so far as Foreign Ministers. I look forward to the start and continuation of a truly meaningful growth in our bilateral relations with Mongolia.

Thank you.