Azerbaijan’s foreign ministry posted the summit’s results on X late on Thursday and Report in Baku carried the list at 23:57: the Baku Declaration and a statement on cooperation in health and labour safety, Laos admitted as a full member, Azerbaijan’s chairmanship extended for 2026 to 2028, and Cambodia’s ratification of the convention on the secretariat’s privileges and immunities, which brought that convention into force. Ambassador Sultan Hajiyev was appointed secretary general of CICA for 2026 to 2030, the ministry said in the same list.
The Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia was Kazakhstan’s initiative of 1992, its secretariat sits in Astana and its secretary general until this summit, Kairat Sarybay, is a Kazakh diplomat. Tokayev reminded the hall that his country had initiated the forum more than three decades ago, Kazinform reported. He also welcomed Laos, which, in his words, joined CICA on Thursday as a full member state.
Ambassador Sultan Hajiyev was appointed secretary general of CICA for 2026 to 2030, the ministry said in the same list.
Laos had signed the forum’s founding documents in Baku on 14 October to accede, with the summit left to confirm its membership, Interfax reported from the Azerbaijani foreign ministry the day before. The confirmation came, and the member count stands at 29.
The extension of the chair had its sponsors in the room. Shavkat Mirziyoyev backed Azerbaijan chairing the forum until 2028 and an Azerbaijani candidate for secretary general, according to Report’s live coverage of the session, and Ilham Aliyev thanked the member states for supporting the proposal to extend the chairmanship. China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, attending as Xi Jinping’s special representative, said the Chinese side also supported the continuation of Azerbaijan’s chairmanship.
Tokayev went further than the ministry’s six points. The CICA member states had reached agreement on transforming the Conference into a full-fledged international organisation, Report quoted him as saying. Belarus’s speaker Igor Sergeenko, who spoke for Alexander Lukashenko, and Türkiye’s Hakan Fidan, who represented Recep Tayyip Erdogan, backed the same transformation, according to APA and Hürriyet Daily News. The ministry’s list of results carries no line on it.
Turkmenistan, an observer state, sent its president without announcing it beforehand. Its state portal reported Serdar Berdimuhamedov’s working visit to Baku only at 23:45 Ashgabat time on 15 October, with the text of his speech beside the report, and no delegation had been announced by Thursday morning. The speech names the status: as an observer state the country is ready to go on contributing to the forum. He proposed an Ashgabat Climate Dialogue, an international code on the peaceful use of artificial intelligence and a global atlas of sustainable transport connectivity, and repeated the initiative to declare 2028 the Year of International Law.
APA’s updated account names the heads who sat at the table: the presidents of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Laos and Israel, Cambodia’s prime minister Hun Manet, Vietnam’s vice president, Belarus’s speaker and Wang Yi. Russia came at foreign minister level, Sergei Lavrov, who met Fidan in Baku, Interfax reported.
The one scene the Central Asian agencies left out came from Turkish media. Representatives of more than 10 countries, Türkiye among them, left the hall when Israel’s president Isaac Herzog began to speak, Hürriyet Daily News reported, citing Anadolu. Fidan said in his own address that the forum’s commitment to peace could not be upheld while Israel, a CICA member, violated the fundamental rights of the Palestinian people. Tokayev met Herzog separately and confirmed Kazakhstan’s principled position on the need to de-escalate tensions and settle conflicts by diplomatic means alone, Akorda said through Kazinform. None of the five Central Asian state agencies prints whether its delegation stayed in the hall.
Each Central Asian president brought proposals of his own. Tokayev proposed a preventive diplomacy mechanism, artificial intelligence as a sixth CICA dimension beside the five existing ones, and a centre for digital solutions under the UN’s Asia-Pacific commission, UNESCAP, that Almaty would host, Kazinform reported. Mirziyoyev put forward an Asian initiative on technological trust and the responsible use of artificial intelligence, a concept for an infrastructure of trust in Asia and a human capital forum in 2027, the Tashkent business site Spot reported from the presidential press service. Sadyr Japarov told the hall that Kyrgyzstan had been elected to the UN Security Council for 2027 to 2028 and proposed a UN trust fund for Issyk-Kul, 24.kg reported. Emomali Rahmon offered the Dushanbe Process on the financing of terrorism and the UN water conference of 2028 in Dushanbe, Asia-Plus reported.
Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan did business of their own on the sidelines: Tokayev and Aliyev switched on a 380 km fibre-optic cable across the Caspian seabed and exchanged a signed agreement on the Middle Corridor, with a $1 billion target for bilateral trade restated, Akorda said. Three of the presidents then flew on to Yerevan for the COP17 leaders’ summit on biodiversity: Tokayev and Rahmon arrived on Thursday evening, Kazinform and Tajikistan’s state agency Khovar reported, and Japarov followed after midnight, by the Kyrgyz agency Akipress’s account. Iran’s Masoud Pezeshkian, who was not in Baku, landed in Armenia on Friday morning, News.am reported.
The Baku Declaration’s text was on neither the secretariat’s site nor Report’s list by Friday morning: s-cica.org still listed the seventh summit among forthcoming events, and its summit-documents page carried no 2026 entry. The ministry’s six points name no host and no date for the eighth summit.