Caspian Legal status comes on agenda again

MThe prospects for interaction between various ministries and departments of Russia and Azerbaijan, countering terrorism, as well as the topics of the legal status of the Caspian Sea were discussed at the meeting.

Decisions on cooperation between the Caspian states are being fully implemented, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said earlier.

A meeting of the high-level working group, established to monitor various aspects of cooperation on the Caspian Sea, is being prepared. The first such meeting in this format will be held soon in Baku.

Caspian Sea – the largest inland body of water – has been in the center of disputes for more than two decades due to a difficulty in granting it the status of either lake or sea.

A landmark agreement was reached and the Convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea was signed by the heads of Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan on August 12 at the 5th Summit of the Heads of Caspian States in Aktau. The Convention is a historic document for the region, the work on which has been carried out for two decades since 1996.

The Caspian Sea gained a special, unique status -- it was declared neither lake nor sea.

According to the Convention, the surface is to be treated as a sea, with states granted jurisdiction over 15 nautical miles of water from their coasts and fishing rights over an additional ten miles.

However, the seabed and its deposits are not allocated in precise form. The delineation of the seabed, which is almost completely an oil and gas basin, is yet to be defined. This division is left to countries to agree on a bilateral basis.

The convention also permits the construction of pipelines, which only require the approval of the countries whose seabed they pass, subject to environmental provisions, and forbids non-Caspian countries from deploying military vessels in the water.

The signing of the Convention has been regarded as a triumph of multilateral diplomacy by the international community and the world media.

The cooperation between Caspian states based on convention is expected to accelerate energy projects, allowing the implementation of the Trans-Caspian Pipeline.