Azerbaijan, Baku, August 21 / Trend J.Babayeva /
Five-sided talks on the legal status of Caspian Sea will be held next month in Ashgabat, with the participation of deputy foreign ministers of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Russia and Iran.
The Turkmen side has officially appealed the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan and other Caspian states with a proposal to hold the meeting, the question is now under consideration, press secretary of the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan Elkhan Polukhov told Trend .
The main topic of discussions at the meeting will be to determine the coordinates of the middle line of the Caspian Sea, which will be divided between the Caspian littoral states upon national sectoral principles. Previous negotiations between the sides to determine the coordinates of the median line took place in 2008 in Baku.
The meeting will be held prior to the Summit of Heads of Caspian States, which, according to the press service of the President of Kazakhstan, is scheduled for September 13 in Aktau.
Five-sided talks on the level of deputy foreign ministers of five countries was scheduled for September 8-9 in Ashgabat, ambassador of Azerbaijan to Turkmenistan Elkhan Huseynov told Trend formerly.
Delegation headed by the Special Representative of the President of Azerbaijan on the status of the Caspian Sea Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Khalaf Khalafov will go to Turkmenistan to participate in the negotiations.
In the issue of division of the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia have no claims to each other. Between these countries there are both bilateral and trilateral agreements on this issue. The sides also agreed to determine the coordinates of the dividing line. The issue was not agreed with only two countries - Turkmenistan and Iran - and therefore, despite many years of discussions, the status of the Caspian Sea has not yet been determined.
Azerbaijan was the first of the Caspian littoral countries, which has begun delimitation of the world's largest lake and definition of the scope of its sovereignty. Exactly the Republic of Azerbaijan has firstly announced the availability of its sector of the Caspian Sea, fixing it on 20 September 1994, signing an international contract ( "Contract of the Century") with Western companies on the model of RSA (production sharing agreement). This was also reflected in the Basic Law of Azerbaijan 1995.
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