Deputy foreign ministers of Caspian Sea states to hold consultations in Azerbaijan in fall

ASTANA, August 14. /TASS/. Deputy foreign ministers of the Caspian Sea states are planning to hold consultations in Azerbaijan in fall of this year in order to discuss the Convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea, Kazakhstan’s Foreign Minister Kairat Abdrakhmanov told journalists on Tuesday. "As mandated by the heads of state, and according to the agreements formalized in the adopted documents, this meeting must take place not later than in six months. Moreover, we already have an agreement that in autumn of this year, the group will meet and begin work immediately. Tentatively, we are talking about a meeting in Azerbaijan," Abdrakhmanov said. According to him, these consultations will be cover the realization of the agreements made within the Convention on the legal status of the Caspian Sea. "According to the convention itself and in order to comply with it, the foreign ministers of the Caspian states, who had met in the wake of the summit, decided to create a special mechanism, a group under the aegis of the foreign ministries that would work on realizing the provisions of the convention. In particular, they will work on such a fundamental and important document as the agreement on the method of establishing the so-called straight baselines," the foreign minister stated. At the fifth Caspian summit on Sunday, Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev, President of Iran Hasan Rouhani, President of Azerbaijan Ilkham Aliyev and President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov inked the document determining the legal status of the Caspian Sea. Work on the document had continued since 1996, while the five nations’ foreign ministers agreed its draft on December 4-5, 2017 in Moscow. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said earlier that the very fact of passing the convention would be a major breakthrough. He said the Caspian quintet would get a "reliable legal foundation giving a possibility to achieve a higher level of cooperation". Read more