Christodoulides and Erhürman to meet on 17 September ahead of UN General Assembly

Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides and Turkish Cypriot leader Tufan Erhürman will hold another meeting on Thursday, 17 September, at 11:00. This will be their last contact before the UN General Assembly in New York.

The meeting is taking place as part of the two leaders’ regular contacts and the continuation of substantive discussions. A day earlier, on Monday, Greek Cypriot negotiator Menelaos Menelaou will meet with Mehmet Dana, the representative of the Turkish Cypriot leader, the Cyprus News Agency reports.

It remains unclear whether there will be a phone call with UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s Personal Envoy Maria Angela Holguín. In recent days, she postponed both her visit to the island and her trip to New York for health reasons.

The high-level week of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly begins on 18 September and will continue until 28 September. The general debate, at which heads of state and government address the assembly, begins on Tuesday, 22 September.

Following the leaders’ previous meeting on 9 September, Christodoulides said that a joint meeting with Erhürman could take place in New York, either with the UN Secretary-General or his Personal Envoy. There has been no confirmation of these plans so far.

At that meeting, the sides continued discussing three issues: methodology, the substance of the negotiations and confidence-building measures. “There has been progress on a number of issues, understood as agreement, while disagreements and different approaches remain on others,” the president said.