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Program of Dmitry Medvedev’s visit to Azerbaijan promulgated

17 November 2010 19:42 (UTC +04:00)

On November 18, the Russian President will attend the 4th summit of Caspian littoral states hosted in Baku, and discuss with his colleagues the issues of defining a new legal status of the Caspian Sea, environment, trans-Caspian pipelines laying, as well as economic cooperation, said the Russian presidential aide Sergei Prikhodko on the eve of the Russian leaderâ€™s visit to Azerbaijan.

The first summit of Caspian littoral statesâ€™ leaders was held on April, 2002 in Ashgabat, the second one on October, 2007, in Tehran.

A meeting with Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev will launch Russian leaderâ€™s visit to Baku. As itâ€™s scheduled by mutual agreement the next meeting will be with his Iranian counterpart Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Besides it, â€œon the fieldsâ€ of the summit a private meeting with President of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev is assumed.

Besides the president, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, presidential aide Sergei Prikhodko, Minister of the Natural Resources Yuri Trutnev, Minister of Energy Sergei Shmatko, head of the Federal Agency for Fishery Andrey Krayniy and director of the FSSâ€™s (Federal Security Service) Border Guard Service Vladimir Pronichev will represent the Russian side at the summit.

The main task of the Caspian summit, as well as the preceding one, is to draw up the convention of the legal status of the Caspian Sea, and at this meeting it wonâ€™t be wrapped up.

On November 2003, the Caspian littoral states (Azerbaijan, Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) signed the Framework Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea.

The time and place of the next summit is expected to be announced at this summit.

Another urgent topic of the agenda of the impending summit is protection of the Caspian’s unique eco and biosphere, said Russian presidentâ€™s aide.

He reported that the final stage is to prepare the protocols of the Framework Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the Caspian Sea, which will contain rules of direct action and "will an effective bar access to the environmental degradation of the sea."

As a result of the summit, the leaders of Azerbaijan, Russia, Iran, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan are going to adopt a joint declaration and agreement on security cooperation that will become a reference point for both collaborative agencies and law enforcement bodies.