President Masoud Pezeshkian's government sent the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea to parliament for ratification on Saturday. [1] Iran International recorded the move at 11:20 GMT+1. [1] A bill sent is not a ratified treaty. It is not a seabed line.
The convention takes effect only when all five littoral states ratify it. [1] Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan already have. Tehran held the file for seven years. The other four finished long ago. Saturday ended the hold, not the argument.
The leaders signed at Aktau, the Kazakh port, in August 2018. [1] The text calls the Caspian a "special and unique landlocked body of water" and keeps it outside the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. [1] Each coastal state gets 15 nautical miles of territorial waters and 10 more of exclusive fishing rights. The remaining surface is a shared navigation zone. [1] Those numbers are surface law. The money is elsewhere.
Article 8 leaves ownership of the seabed and its oil and gas to later bilateral or multilateral deals. [1] Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan have largely settled their northern lines. The lines involving Iran, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan remain open. [1] A framework without those lines is a map with the richest squares blank.
Iran has argued since the Soviet collapse that the sea should be split equally, 20 percent each. [1] A modified median line, because of Iran's concave coast, would leave Tehran with roughly 11 to 13 percent of the bed. [1] Iran has never accepted that cut. The 1921 and 1940 treaties with Moscow recognized equal navigation and fishing and drew no maritime boundaries. [1] The ghost of a fifty-percent share still trails every Iranian discussion of the sea. The convention allocates no national shares at all. [1] The ghost does not care.
The timing is the southern contrast. Hormuz is closed. The Caspian corridor to Russia now carries an outsized share of Iran's commerce. [1] Officials present ratification as a sealed northern flank. Article 3 bars the armed forces of non-coastal countries. [1] Defa Press, tied to the armed forces, wrote that the clause would "turn Iran's northern borders into a secure region, far removed from scenarios of foreign military intervention." [1] A barred fleet is not a drawn oil line.
Critics say parliament is sequencing the deal backwards. Dariush Safarnejad told the Revolutionary Guards-linked Javan that lawmakers should return the bill, because supplementary agreements meant to be finished within six months of the 2018 signing were never finalized. [1] Shoaib Bahman told the same paper that ratifying before the seabed is set would "effectively reduce Iran's legal leverage in future negotiations." [1] Article 14 lets undersea pipelines proceed with consent only of the states whose sectors they cross, not all five. [1] Bahman said that clause could open an eastern export path toward Europe and erode Iran's transit claim.
Mehdi Seif-Tabrizi told Fararu that the 15 miles and the 10 miles are guaranteed and that "the real dispute concerns the seabed and subsoil." [1] He still warned that a Trans-Caspian pipeline from Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan could finally be built. [1] Ratification, he said, would remove one legal obstacle.
Prince Reza Pahlavi wrote that ratifying without a popular mandate and without a "clear and comprehensive guarantee of Iran's historic rights" is "deeply concerning." [1] Saeed Ghasseminejad, a senior Pahlavi adviser, called the move "the biggest surrender of Iran's land and waters to foreign powers since the Qajar-era humiliations." [1] Those are exile sentences. They are not a Majlis vote.
Saturday's completed record is a bill on a desk. Four seals already exist. The fifth is still wax. Exile accounts will file a giveaway. Iran International files a wartime cleanup. The underplayed line is sequencing. Tehran is trying to lock a Caspian framework while the oil squares stay undivided and the southern strait stays shut.
-- KATYA VOLKOV, Moscow