Baku, Azerbaijan, Aug. 14
Trend:
Deputy foreign ministers of the Caspian countries are planning to hold in Azerbaijan this autumn the consultations on the Convention on the legal status of the Caspian sea, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Kazakhstan Kairat Abdrakhmanov told reporters Aug. 14, TASS reported.
"This meeting should take place no later than six months according to the instruction given by the heads of state, and according to the agreements stipulated in the adopted documents. Moreover, there is already an agreement that the group will gather and start working directly this autumn. According to the preliminary data, this refers to the meeting to be held in Azerbaijan," Abdrakhmanov said.
He noted that these consultations will concern the implementation of the agreements reached in the Convention on the legal status of the Caspian sea.
"According to the Convention and in pursuance of it, the ministers of foreign affairs of the Caspian states, who held their meeting the day before the summit, decided to establish a special mechanism, a group under the auspices of the ministries of foreign affairs, which will engage in implementation of the provisions of the convention, in particular, in the work over such a fundamental and important document as an agreement on the method of establishing the so-called straight baselines," the foreign minister said.
Following the meeting of the fifth Caspian summit in Aktau on August 12, the presidents of Russia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan signed the Convention on the legal status of the Caspian sea. The work on the document has been underway since 1996, and the draft convention was finally agreed upon at the meeting of the foreign ministers of the Caspian states on December 4-5, 2017 in Moscow. Several sectoral documents on cooperation in the region were also signed.