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Ashgabat committed to active cooperation on Caspian Sea

21 February 2017 [18:00] - TODAY.AZ

By Azernews


By Kamila Aliyeva

Turkmenistan will continue to actively cooperate on the Caspian Sea on the five-party basis, said President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov at the enlarged meeting of the Cabinet on February 21.

The newly re-elected for the third term, President Berdimuhamedov outlined the top priorities for the foreign policy of Turkmenistan for the next seven years.

The president mentioned that significant progresses have been reached in addressing some of the major issues on the Caspian Sea, including an agreement on approaches to its legal status.

Agreements on protection and rational use of the Caspian Sea water and biological resources, prevention and elimination of emergency situations in the Caspian Sea have been put forward by Turkmenistan and signed and approved by all the Caspian littoral states. 

“We also put forward an initiative to study the documents on trade-economic and transport cooperation on the Caspian Sea,” Berdimuhamedov said, stressing the importance of systematic work with the Caspian countries to maintain the initiative, establish regular and target-oriented relationships in these promising areas of the cooperation. 

The Caspian Sea is surrounded by the five coastal countries of Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan. The Sea has a total surface area of 371,000 km², holding 78,200 cubic km of water.

The legal status of the Caspian Sea has remained unsolved during the past two decades, preventing development and exploitation of its disputable oil and gas fields and creating obstacles to the realization of major projects.

Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan hold to the principle of dividing into national sectors based on the “median line” principles since it is an international boundary lake, and leaving the sea surface for general use, i.e. they are for demarcation of mineral resources and the Caspian Sea shelf, but against dividing up its waters. 

Iran seeks an equal division of the Caspian into 5 even sectors, mainly because most of the offshore energy resources are located away from the Iranian coastline. Turkmenistan also demands the division of the Sea into equal parts between the pre-Caspian countries so that each country has 20 percent of the sea.

The Caspian littoral states  signed a Framework Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea in November 2003.

URL: http://www.today.az/news/regions/158832.html

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