Caspian Sea legal regime requires consensus: Iranian official

TEHRAN,Dec.18(MNA) – Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammad Mehdi Akhoundzadeh said on Monday that any decision about the Caspian Sea requires a consensus among the littoral states of the sea. Akhoundzadeh, who is the deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, has travelled to Turkmenistan to attend a working meeting of deputy foreign ministers and special envoys of the Caspian Sea littoral states on the formulation of the legal regime of the sea, which opened on Monday in the capital city of Ashgabat and closes on Tuesday. Akhoundzadeh was also scheduled to hold meetings with other countries’ officials on the sidelines of the meeting. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the littoral states have held numerous expert meetings and have made progress in some areas. For example, a convention for protecting the sea’s environment was signed by Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Turkmenistan in November 2003 and went into effect on August 12, 2006, with the cooperation of the UN Environment Program (UNEP). An agreement on sharing the sea could pave the way for great new developments, particularly seabed oil and natural gas pipelines that could dramatically change the economic landscape of the region, which holds up to 200 billion barrels of recoverable oil according to some estimates. So far, the littoral states have reached a consensus on 70 percent of the Caspian Sea legal regime.