Caspian Sea Legal Regime Convention: Defense-Security Perspective

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 and the rise of the Caspian Sea littoral states to 5 countries, the legal regime of the sea emerged in conjunction with increasing growth of innovation in exploration and extraction of deep seabed resources. In this line, since 1997, many meetings and endeavors have been conducted littoral countries, however, the agreements have never formed an official basis. In recent years, with a background of expertise on the problems concerned to Caspian Sea legal regime convention and aiming to handle the mentioned challenge and to reach a balanced regional point for signing the convention on the legal regime of Caspian Sea except in two cases of setting the territorial sea baseline and sea deep seabed resources, the convention was signed by the littoral countries in July 2018. Although the signature of this convention has had positive consequences on increasing the regional interaction, there are still many legal uncertainties in the defense and security spheres for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Therefore, focusing on all the clauses of this agreement and the lack of haste in its adoption in the interests of the Islamic Republic of Iran in the fields of defense and security should be taken into consideration.