From the airport, the Turkmen leader’s cortege headed to the venue for the Summit – Friendship Palace, where President of the Republic of Kazakhstan Nursultan Nazarbayev welcomed the President of Turkmenistan.
President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran Hasan Rukhani and President of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin arrived in Aktau to take part in the summit.
The meeting of the ministers of foreign affairs of the Caspian littoral states took place in Aktau on the eve of the forum.
The Headsa of the littoral states headed to the Conference Hall in the Friendship Palace, where the top-level meeting was held in an extended format.
A number of documents, including the Convention of the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea are to be signed on the outcomes of the summit.
The Caspian region issues occupy an important place in the foreign policy strategy of Turkmenistan. The legal and organizational form of the negotiation mechanism to develop the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea, operating on a systematic basis in the form of a Special Working Group was elaborated during a meeting of the foreign ministers of the Caspian states held in Ashgabat in 1996.
Based on the necessity to bring the negotiation process to a qualitatively new level, Turkmenistan initiated the first summit of the heads of the Caspian states, which was held in Ashgabat in 2002. Turkmenistan offered insights into the strategy of the five-sided partnership, based on the consolidation of efforts and shared responsibility for the fate of the Caspian sea as well as the universally recognized norms of the international law. Thus, Ashgabat has made it into history as a city where the foundation of a fundamentally new format of dialogue on the Caspian Sea was laid.
Ashgabat Summit was the starting point for identifying the priority vectors for fruitful cooperation for the short- and long-term perspective. The dialogue launched in the Turkmen capital received its worthy continuation: its results established the basis for the important decisions taken at the Summits in Tehran, Baku and Astrakhan, held in 2007, 2010 and 2014 respectively.
