The Meeting of Extended UNNExT Advisory Group on Cross-border Paperless Trade Facilitation, organized by UNESCAP, was held on 30 October – 1 November 2018 in Bangkok.

The meeting brought together selected members of UNNExT Advisory Committee and relevant Advisory Groups as well as regional experts to work on legal and technical issues of facilitating cross-border paperless trade. The meeting focused on selected legal and technical work items, including legal gap checklist, technical gap checklist and mutual recognition mechanism for trade-related data and documents in electronic form. The outcome of the meeting will be used as an input for the Legal and Technical Working Groups (LTWGs) of the Interim Intergovernmental Steering Group on Cross-border Paperless Trade Facilitation in further advancing delivery of supporting documents of the draft road map.

Prof. Xue is invited to give a keynote presentation on “Mutual recognition mechanism for trade related data and documents in electronic form under the Framework Agreement on Cross-border Paperless Trade”. She gave a comprehensive review of the Article 8 of the Framework Agreement and proposed the potential institutional arrangement to enable mutual recognition within the legal framework. She emphasized that whatever technical means deployed to achieve the effect the legal consistency under the Agreement has to be assured through institutional arrangement.