The one-day conference on the Caspian Sea at foreign ministry level ended Wednesday in Tehran without any agreement on the sea's new legal status, the main aim of the meeting, according to dpa. Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki said at the end of the conference that the foreign ministers of the littoral states as well several expert teams prepared the ground for a Caspian Sea summit in Tehran, the date of which was still to be fixed. Mottaki said the Caspian Sea's legal status was the top item of the agenda and noted that the sea should be used by the five states as an anchor of peace and stability. The five littoral Caspian Sea states are Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan. Also at the conference was Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov who said that no legal status of the Caspian Sea could be made ready until the summit and therefore a provisional document should be adopted in the near future. The legal status of the Caspian Sea has been in dispute among the five littoral states for over almost fifteen years, especially after the independence of the three former Soviet republics Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.
