Azernews.Az

Azerbaijani Deputy Foreign Minister Khalaf Khalafov has said there are a lot of fundamental issues on the legal status of the resource-rich Caspian Sea which ``need improvement``.

Khalafov, who participated in the meeting of CIS Foreign Ministers Council in Astana last week, told the Baku-based Trend news agency that the working group to define the Caspian status continues its hard work on every point of a document to be adopted in the future by the coastal nations - Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Turkmenistan and Iran.

Khalafov expects another meeting of the joint taskforce to be held in May, presumably in Ashgabat.

He noted that the parties are working both in bilateral and multilateral formats, and, in principle, all countries have shown interest in ``a speedy harmonization of the remaining issues``.

Azerbaijan, Russia and Kazakhstan signed an agreement in 2001 on dividing the Caspian`s northern area into national sectors, with Azerbaijan and Russia each possessing 19 percent, while the Central Asian state received 29 percent. However, Iran and Turkmenistan did not sign the agreement.

Iran wants all resources shared equally among the five states, even though its coast accounts for less than 14 percent.