Caspian working group to meet in February

TThe first meeting of the working group for implementation of the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea is scheduled to be held in February in Baku, Spokeswoman of the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan Leyla Abdullayeva told Trend.

“The first meeting of the working group is scheduled for February. The exact date of the meeting will be announced this week,” she said.

In order to elaborate a Convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea, a special working group at the level of deputy foreign ministers was established in 1996 by the Caspian states. The work on the agreement lasted for more than 20 years before August 12 marked the meeting of the heads of five Caspian states who signed the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea at the 5th Summit of the Heads in Aktau. The Convention is a historic achievement for the region, the work on which has been carried out for two decades.

The Convention was signed by Russian President Vladimir Putin, Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev, President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev and President of Iran Hassan Rouhani.

The Convention grants jurisdiction over 15 miles of territorial waters to each neighboring country, plus additional 10 miles of exclusive fishing rights on the surface, while the rest is considered international waters. The seabed, on the other hand, remains undefined, subject to bilateral agreements between countries. Thus, the Caspian Sea is legally neither fully a sea nor a lake.

During the years of approval of the convention (1996–2018), the parties held over 51 meetings of the special working groups, more than ten meetings of foreign ministers and four presidential summits in 2002 in Ashgabat, in 2007 in Tehran, in 2010 in Baku and in 2014 in Astrakhan

Before the landmark Caspian Summit, the 51st meeting of the Special Working Group took place in Astana in May 2018, during which the sides have found consensus on multiple agreements: Agreements on cooperation in the field of transport; trade and economic cooperation; prevention of incidents on the sea; combating terrorism; fighting against organized crime; and border security cooperation.

Over the past 25 years, there have been attempts to sow discord among the littoral states and to turn the Caspian Sea into an open arena for the military forces of countries not related to this sea. However, due to firm political will of the heads of Caspian littoral states, those attempts were doomed to failure.

With the signing of this historic Convention, a new era of large transit, transport and logistical opportunities of Azerbaijan along the North-South and East-West corridors has begun. Moreover, a new page of cooperation with neighbors was opened.