Kathmandu, June 18: A meeting of the standing committee of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), comprising the foreign secretaries of the seven member nations, will be held in Kathmandu on July 9 and 10 to finalise the date for the next summit of the organisation, official sources today said. The 12th SAARC summit is to be held in Islamabad sometime in December this year, Nepal's foreign secretary Madhu Raman Acharya said, adding that the standing committee will seek to finalise the dates for the summit.

''However, Pakistan has not officially proposed any date so far,'' he said. The 12th summit was originally scheduled for January 2003, but was postponed due to continued tension between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir issue.

Nepal, currently, holds the chair of the seven member association, whose other members are Bhutan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Maldives.

Bureau Report