Azerbaijan, Baku / Тrend corr A. Badalova / Foreign experts forecast a consensus on Caspian Sea's status will not be achieved on the Summit of Caspian Sea's Littoral Countries to be held in Teheran on 16 October.
"Adoption of a resolution will take a plenty of time," a British expert, the editor of the Nefte Compass, Michael Ritchie, said on 23 August.
The summit in Teheran will be the second. During the first summit in Ashgabat in April 2002 the Presidents agreed to hold such meetings annually. However, a regularly summit has not been held yet so far. During this period Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan changed their presidents.
" Turkmenistan and Iran are not likely to change their positions regarding the status of the Caspian Sea," he said.
Ritchie believes that change of administration in Turkmenistan is a good opportunity to achieve an agreement with other countries, namely Azerbaijan, Russia, and Kazakhstan.
But the process will be very slow," he said.
Before the USSR collapsed the Caspian Sea's legal status was based on Soviet-Iranian agreements of 1921 and 1940. Now, lack of the parameters of delimitation of oil and gas prospective fields among the littoral countries resulted in the necessity of a new status of the sea based on a consensus among the all five littoral countries ( Azerbaijan, Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran).