Int'l humanitarian forum to open in Baku.

BAKU, October 10 (Itar-Tass) -- The international humanitarian forum
"The Twenty-First Century: Hopes and Challenges" will open in the
Azerbaijani capital on Monday. The forum is held under the patronage of
Presidents of Russia and Azerbaijan Dmitry Medvedev and Ilham Aliyev.
Representatives from more than 20 countries, including Russia, are
participating in the forum. Well-known politicians, figures of culture and
arts, scientists and the chiefs of leading world mass media are
participating in the forum. The chief of the Russian presidential staff
Sergei Naryshkin heads an authoritative Russian delegation.
The forum will open on Monday morning at the Gulistan Palace in
downtown Baku. The palace is a venue for important international and
republican events. Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will deliver a
speech at the opening ceremony. Sergei Naryshkin will read out Russian
President Dmitry Medvedev's message of greetings to the forum. UN and
UNESCO high-ranking officials, President of the Russian Academy of
Sciences Yuri Osipov and his Azerbaijani counterpart Mahmud Kerimov will
also deliver speeches at the forum.
The Baku forum "offers to consider the humanitarian aspects in the
hopes and challenges of the twenty-first century with due account of the
realities in a globalizing world," a source in the forum organizing
committee said. "The forum organizers, who are representatives of natural,
economic sciences, humanities and the cultural elite, set an ambitious
task to form a new humanitarian agenda to spread it on the international
scale," the source said.
Russian presidential special envoy for international cultural
cooperation Mikhail Shvydkoi said in an interview with local media on the
eve of this important event that the Baku forum "may turn in some kind of
intellectual Davos." "The attempt to consider humanitarian aspects of
human activities - scientific, economic and industrial - is a quite new
approach to assess the current situation in the world," he noted.
After a plenary meeting the forum will continue in various panels,
which will discuss topical issues of humanitarian activities, including
science, education, culture, journalism and modern technologies. The
section meetings on the second day of the forum will be devoted to the
achievements and problems of multiculturalism, modern technologies that
changed the world, the convergence of sciences, biotechnologies and
ethical problems, humanitarian aspects of economic models of development,
social journalism and high technologies and traditional systems of values
in the post-modernism culture. Outstanding personalities in science and culture, including the Nobel Prize laureates, will participate in the
discussions.
The forum will hold a presentation of the book "Humanitarian
Challenges of the Twenty-First Century", which is a collection of the
speeches on humanitarian problems by the presidents of Russia and
Azerbaijan. The book presentation will be held at the M.F. Akhundov
National Library. The chiefs of the presidential staffs of the countries
Sergei Naryshkin and Ramiz Mekhtiyev will attend the book presentation.
The first Russian-Azerbaijani forum on humanitarian cooperation was
held in Baku in January 2010. After the forum the presidents decided to
make the forum international as an authoritative venue to debate global
modern humanitarian problems.