Volume 5-10 Article

The Caspian Sea Dispute: The Role of International Law

by Cesare P.R. Romano

Until the demise of the USSR the Caspian rarely made it to the headlines. For much of the twentieth century it had been the exclusive domain of Iran and the Soviet Union. The USSR enjoyed a de facto control of much of the Caspian and complete naval dominance, while Iran did not, nor realistically could, contest the supremacy of its powerful northern neighbor. Because of this situation, the two states never felt the urge to codify in a treaty the Caspian's legal regime nor to establish precisely the territorial extension and nature of their respective rights.

On December 8, 1991, the Soviet Union, as a single subject of international law, disappeared to be replaced by the Commonwealth of Independent States, a loose diplomatic caucus. Overnight the number of sovereign states around the Caspian rose to five, each advancing contrasting legal claims on parts or the whole of it. Since then, the issue of how far from the coast and what legal rights Caspian states enjoy turned from a mere footnote in international law manuals into a tangled international dispute with a multi-billion dollar stake. Under the Caspian lie vast oil and gas reservoirs. Some have been exploited since the nineteenth century, many more are believed to have great potential.

To date, some forty companies from twenty-two different nations have concluded agreements with Caspian states to explore and exploit its riches, investing more than $60 billion. Yet, such a gold rush does not seem to have been hampered by the vagueness of the legal situation. The nature and geographic extension of states' sovereign rights is still clouded by a fog which gets thicker as one moves off the Caspian coast. In absence of a clear legal situation, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan have started advancing claims over parts, and Russia and Iran on the whole of it. The failure of negotiations on the sharing of Caspian resources and its sustainable development has eventually opened the way to unilateral actions.

The dispute over the legal regime of the Caspian raises numerous problems that touch on major areas of international law, such as law of treaties, law of the sea, environmental law, sources of law, territorial sovereignty, state responsibility, and state succession among others. Yet, what makes the Caspian a particularly frustrating predicament for international legal scholars is the almost total absence of any hold to cling to. There are almost no treaties specifying which international legal regime has applied to that body of water; and those few that exist are riddled by omissions or are plainly obsolete. Local custom is vague and extremely inconsistent. General international law does not shed much light on the matter either.

However the problem is approached, it inevitably makes scholars wonder whether the Caspian is to be legally classified as a lake or a sea, or, more precisely, an international lake or an enclosed sea. Classification under one of these headings would point to the body of law according to which it should be regulated. Admittedly, the scarcity of codified legal rules has made the deductive approach to the Caspian legal regime look like a relatively easy way out of the quagmire. Yet, the results have been dismaying. Even if the Caspian is considered as a sea, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) cannot be used to determine coastal states' rights and duties. Indeed, beside the fact that of all Caspian states only Russia has signed and ratified the Convention, its letter and negotiating history seems to exclude the Caspian from its purview. Customary international law of the sea might be resorted to by default, but it might be an utterly complicated and vain exercise to determine to what extent Caspian regional custom does not derogate to general custom. Conversely, if the Caspian was to be classified as a lake, the legal situation would not be any clearer because State practice concerning international lakes is far from consistent and, in any event, does not address the key issues at stake in the region (i.e. mineral resources and their transport).

Other scholars have more appropriately pointed out the futility of a deductive and dogmatic approach. First of all, legally speaking, the Caspian does not seem to be neither a lake nor a sea. At best, it might be described as a case of "geographic regionalism", or "situational regionalism" stemming, as one scholar wrote, "...from the totality of ties existing between coastal states of a given maritime space which, at times, leads them to adopt among themselves specific regulations uniquely applicable to the area under consideration" Yet again, Caspian states never adopted any such "specific regulations".

Still, the real issue is not whether the Caspian is a sea or a lake as such, but rather whether, in light of its own physical, historic and legal characteristics, its regime is, or should be, comparable to the regime we normally associate with lakes or with enclosed seas, in each case bordered by more than one State. The definition of the Caspian legal regime and the filling of its lacunae cannot be left to abstract speculations of scholars. It is up to Caspian states to do so. International law does not have ready-made solutions to offer but only general legal principles which Caspian states are bound to respect and templates from which they may draw inspiration.

The aim of this article is to illustrate the baffling complexity of the Caspian quagmire. The focus is on oil and gas issues. Other issues, such as protection of the regional environment, sustainable management of fisheries (sturgeon foremost), navigation and regional security, while of great importance, to date have not attracted as much attention as hydrocarbons. Substantial agreement on these issues does not seem to be as close as that on the division of oil and gas fields. After almost a decade of fruitless diplomatic negotiations, it seems that the Caspian seabed is destined, soon or later, to be partitioned according to the principle of equidistance. International legal scholars, fooled by the Caspian's contradictions, can take a revenge by answering the question of how the principle of equidistance is to be translated into a line on charts.

The Current Legal Regime: Deliberate Anarchy?

The Czarist Age (1729-1917)

The hallmark of Russian-Persian relations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is Russia's relentless southward expansion towards the Caucasus and beyond. The first treaty concerning the Caspian region to be concluded between the Russian and the Persian empires was the Treaty of Resht, signed on February 13, 1729. In essence, it demarcated and ceded to Russia some Persian territories, and provided for freedom of commerce and navigation on the Caspian and the Araks and Kura rivers.

The second relevant agreement is the so-called Treaty of Gulistan, signed on the River Seiwa on October 12, 1813, which put an end to the nine-years war (1804-1813) between Russia and Persia. While the treaty granted equal rights of navigation to the commercial fleet of both empires, it reserved to Russia the exclusive right of sailing the Caspian with its military fleet. This same exclusive right was reiterated fifteen years later, on February 22, 1828, in the Treaty of Turkomanchaï, which superseded the Treaty of Gulistan, and which put an end to the 1826-28 Russia-Persia war.

The Soviet Age (1917-1989).

The Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 swept away the heritage of Czarist Russia. As one of the ideological tenets of the early revolution was the forswearing of imperialism and colonialism, on February 26, 1921 Persia and the Socialist Federal Republic of the Soviets of Russia (SFRSR) signed in Moscow a new agreement, declaring null and void the treaties of Gulistan and Turkomanchaï. However, once again, the issue of the delimitation of sovereignty on the Caspian was not addressed. Except for the restoration of Persia's equal right of navigation, the 1921 Treaty did not specifically address the issue of the legal regime of the Caspian.

It was only in the 1930's that increased navigation and fishing in the Caspian forced the two states to develop a limited legal framework to regulate such activities. On navigational issues, negotiations led to the conclusion on August 27, 1935 of the Treaty of Establishment, Commerce and Navigation, subsequently replaced, on March 25, 1940, by the Treaty of Commerce and Navigation. While the 1935 and 1940 treaties granted unfettered freedom of navigation (military and commercial) to both countries, they nevertheless excluded third states from the Caspian.

Concerning the issue of fishing rights, the 1935 and 1940 treaties provided for freedom of fishing for both states in all parts of the Caspian, with the exception of an exclusive ten-mile fishing coastal zone. However, for long time, fishing in the southern part of the Caspian, beyond the ten-mile Iranian zone, was carried out on the terms of a concession granted to a joint Soviet-Iranian company, established in 1927.

Beside these two sectoral conventions, and despite the fact that Iran and the USSR eventually agreed on their extended land-border, the two countries never resolved the issue of delimiting their sovereignty over the Caspian waters. The question of determining how far south the USSR could exercise its sovereignty was left to unilateral Soviet assertions, which Iran never dared to contest.

For a long time, the centralism of the Soviet regime did not encourage the establishment of any kind of boundaries on the Caspian between the federated republics either. Only in the 1970s, the USSR Oil and Gas Ministry partitioned the Caspian seabed into Kazakh, Azeri, Russian and Turkmen sectors on the basis of the equidistance principle. Yet the legal value of such a delimitation, as well of other subsequent enactments by other authorities, is unclear. Strangely enough, Caspian states do not seem to ever have relied on the 1970 USSR Oil and Gas Ministry Ordinance to substantiate their present claims. Scholars have not explored the applicability of the principle of uti possidetis juris to the Caspian puzzle either.

The Post-Cold War Age (1990-….)

With the collapse of the Soviet Union the number of sovereign states abutting on the Caspian rose from two to five (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Russia and Turkmenistan). For centuries the Caspian had been regulated by a de facto regime where Russia, first, and the USSR later, had the lion's share. However, neither customary international law concerning states succession, nor the Minsk Agreement of December 8, 1991, which buried the Soviet Union and regulated the transition to the CIS, could help fill the legal chasm into which newly emerging states eventually fell. As it has been illustrated, there are not many treaty-based or customary rights and duties that could be carried over to the successors, while those few that can be transmitted are patently inadequate to answer the challenges of the twenty-first century. Soviet-era agreements are obsolete and do not address the key issues of regional security, trade and communication among Caspian states themselves and with states outside the Caspian area, or the sustainable development of its natural resources.

It is a daunting task to summarize the vagaries of almost a decade of bilateral and multilateral negotiations between Caspian states to build a viable legal regime. Suffice to say, the geographical position of known and conjectured oil and gas fields has, by and large, shaped legal claims. To different degrees, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, the states whose coasts are the closest to the largest known oil fields, have claimed that the Caspian should be partitioned. Conversely, Russia and Iran, the two powers that formerly controlled it, and whose coasts are the remotest from oil and gas fields, have interpreted the loose legal regime of the Soviet era as a sort of international condominium, where all Caspian states, old an new, would have equal rights on the whole of it. Nonetheless, the condominium thesis has gradually lost credibility as all Caspian states, Russia included, since the break-up of the USSR have done very little to behave as actual joint-owners.

The inability to adopt by consensus a framework agreement covering all different aspects of concern to Caspian states has eventually opened the way to unilateral actions and bilateral negotiations. Wide political, cultural and strategic divides between the five Caspian states make a single, unitary legal regime (perhaps codified in a regional framework convention) seem unlikely. Currently, it is much more likely that a series of analogous bilateral agreements between neighboring states will become the basis of the future Caspian legal regime. For instance, the recent agreement concluded on July 6, 1998 between Russia and Kazakhstan, partitioning the northern part of the Caspian sea-bed according to the principle of equidistance, corrected to achieve an equitable result, is the single most significant development towards the genesis of a modern Caspian legal regime. The agreement, however, concerns only the seabed. For all other matters, the parties expressed the intention to jointly regulate navigation, fishing and environmental protection although envisioning, at the same time, the conclusion of sectoral agreements to delimit zones within which each of them would exercise border, custom and sanitary controls as well as fishing areas.

Undoubtedly the 1998 Russia-Kazakhstan Agreement is a step out of the Caspian legal quagmire. It is the first bilateral treaty concluded between two of the former Soviet Republics on the key issue of boundary delimitation and exploitation of mineral resources. Yet, it is riddled by omissions and ambiguities. The most obvious are, firstly, that it addresses the northern Caspian without specifying its boundaries, and, thus, where the seabed areas of Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan begin. Secondly, it does not establish per se a clear demarcation between the seabed belonging to two countries. It merely establishes the general principle on which eventual partition should take place (equidistance corrected by equitable principles), and leaves the task of tracing the boundary to a subsequent protocol to the agreement. To date, Russia and Kazakhstan have not yet reached an agreement on how to trace such a boundary and, given the volatility of regional politics, it is not possible to predict when that will happen.

So far the main import of the 1998 Russia-Kazakhstan Agreement is to suggest that Russia is ready to give up the thesis that the Caspian is an area of joint ownership and is ready to move ahead with partition, maybe through the conclusion of a series of similar bilateral agreements between each and all of other Caspian states. Such agreements, by removing from the table the highly contentious issue of ownership of mineral resources, might eventually facilitate the conclusion of a region-wide agreement on the exploitation and protection of biological resources, navigation, environmental protection and security.

Towards the Partitioning of the Caspian Seabed: A Few Considerations

If partitioning of the Caspian seems to be the way, it is still far from clear not only how it will be effected but also which rights each Caspian state will accord others and claim for itself within each "national area". Even in the case of the 1998 Russia-Kazakhstan agreement, the first and so far only treaty sanctioning the division, these crucial issues are left undetermined. Again, the incapacity of the parties to formulate in unambiguous terms their commitments, leaves to customary international law the task of filling in the gaps. But this poses again the dilemma of what is the appropriate body of international law to draw from: that of the law of the sea or that of the law of international lakes.

Of course none of the two has to be selected as the customary body of law to govern relations between Caspian states per se. As it has already been said, the Caspian does not fall under either classification and Caspian states are free to determine its own original law by way of agreement. What international law can offer in this case are paradigms. The nature of state's rights over the mineral resources in the subsoil of bodies of water, and the answer international law gives to the question of how far from one state's coast its sovereign rights end and at which point those of the neighbors begin, differ in the case of seas and international lakes. It is useful to investigate how.

The Nature of States' Rights on the Caspian Subsoil and its Resources

Whether the Caspian is considered an enclosed sea or a lake does affect the nature of states' rights over the mineral resources in the subsoil of their own share of it. This might have multiple consequences for financial matters, particularly for lending institutions.

States have full and unfettered sovereignty on the subsoil of lakes up to the international boundary, in a manner not different from that enjoyed on their land. No other state has legal entitlements, and it is at the discretion of the state concerned to decide whether it intends to hold title over all mineral resources or allow them to be owned by private parties and on what terms. Conversely, coastal states' sovereign rights on the sea-subsoil beyond the limits of the territorial sea (i.e. continental shelf) are conditional. Indeed, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea provides that coastal states' jurisdiction extends to the subsoil of the continental shelf only for the purpose of exploration and exploitation of natural resources. It is a sort of functional, or better, conditional sovereignty. This has several legal consequences.

First, being a functional sovereignty, states must ensure that the legislation they pass in relation to the continental shelf is limited only to matters relating to the exploration and exploitation of shelf resources. Second, while no other state may explore and exploit without the coastal state's permission, the granting of licenses for that purpose does not transfer property between the licenser and the licensee. The licensee is simply entitled to explore and exploit. Legal title over mineral resources is not transferred by the license itself, but rather through the eventual (and at this stage largely hypothetical) "action of reduction into possession" (i.e. the actual drilling and pumping out of gas or oil). This difference might be momentous because lending institutions might request higher interest rates to borrow would-be-developers' money against a mere expectation of returns rather than sound proprietary rights.

The Spatial Extension of States' Rights on the Caspian Subsoil and its Resources.

Concerning the question of the spatial extension of states' sovereign rights on the Caspian subsoil, and limiting the scope of the analysis to mineral resources, whether the Caspian's legal status is that of a lake or an enclosed sea at first glance does not have relevant implications. Even if it were considered as a sea, because of the relatively limited size of the Caspian the whole of its seabed would be under some states' sovereignty. Only Caspian states would have a legal right to the exploitation of the mineral resources of its subsoil. Having said that, while in either case the real problem is to determine how far from one State's coast its sovereign rights end and at which point those of the neighbors begin, the answer international law gives might depend on the legal designation of the body of water.

Since the concept of continental shelf emerged in international law in the 1950s, several dozens of disputes have taken place on its delimitation. Several of them have been settled by agreement, many others through adjudication. The International Court of Justice has developed a substantial and quite consistent jurisprudence on the delimitation of maritime boundaries on the continental shelf which might provide some insight on the factors that might be taken into account by any judicial body eventually called to partition the Caspian.

In this regard, the two North Sea Continental Shelf cases are probably the most important and seminal, because they involved three competing sovereign claims over the same sea-bed area. The International Court of Justice reached the conclusion that under customary international law delimitation of the continental shelf "...is to be effected…in accordance with equitable principles and taking into account all the relevant circumstances...". Thus, according to the World Court "equitable principles" form part of customary international law, but how they are to be translated on the map seems to be more an art than a science.

The most obvious and most practical method of delimitation would appear to be the drawing of lines each point of which is equidistant from the nearest points of the baselines or shores of the states concerned. However, equidistant lines might not invariably yield equitable results, because of many complicating factors (e.g. islands, peninsulas, concave or convex coastlines). According to some scholars, the factors that under customary international law should be taken into account in an "equitable delimitation" are:

Geographical factors, namely the configuration of coasts (concave or convex), the relationship of one coast to another (contiguous or counterpoised), the overall extension of the shelf area abutting on these coasts, and the presence of islands;
Natural resources across overlapping claims;
Proportionality, namely the element of a reasonable degree of proportionality between the respective coastlines and the extent of the continental shelf areas appertaining to each party. How these factors are to be weighted in each particular case is a matter of judicial wisdom.

Irrelevant factors, conversely, seem to be:

Geophysical discontinuity: The geomorphologic homogeneity of the land mass and of the continental shelf should not be taken into account;
The size of land mass: states with a large land surface are not thereby entitled to a larger share of the continental shelf;
Economic weight: Elements like the population, industrial activity, GNP, or per capita income, should not be taken into account in the determination of the extension of the continental shelf.

Thus, under international law equitable principles must be applied in the delimitation of maritime boundaries. It is an interesting question, however, how equitable principles would apply if the Caspian were to be regarded as a lake. Admittedly, unlike in the case of the sea, there does not seem to be any customary rule in international law concerning the delimitation of internal waters. Nonetheless, there seems to be little reason to believe that the principles underlying maritime delimitation should be inherently different from those of lakes. In the North Sea Continental Shelf cases both the majority as well as some individual judges examined the general law of delimitation with respect to marine areas and lakes without much distinction, particularly insofar as internal waters are concerned. What is more, even if it is conceded that the delimitation itself of internal waters in not subject to equitable principles, it could be still applied to its resources.

In 1997, after twenty-three years of work by the International Law Commission, the UN General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses (the Convention). While the Convention has not yet entered into force, it nonetheless contains a set of general rules that may eventually be applied or adjusted and supplemented by individual agreements between Caspian states.

Article 2 of the Convention defines a "watercourse" as "a system of surface waters and ground waters constituting by virtue of their physical relationship a unitary whole and normally flowing into a common terminus". An "international watercourse" is defined as "a watercourse, parts of which are situated in different states". The definition of international watercourse provided by the Convention is malleable enough to accommodate the Caspian. Indeed, the Caspian does not flow into a common terminus (it does not have effluents), though the adjective "normally" allows for some flexibility.

Beside terminology and taxonomy, the main limit to the applicability of the Convention on International Watercourses to the Caspian is that it was conceived to resolve the problem of the concurrent use of the water of international watercourses and not, specifically, of the resources underneath. Yet, the Convention still provides some useful insight on how the idea of "equitable use" should be applied to a international lake. Article 5.1 reads:

"Watercourse States shall in their respective territories utilize an international watercourse in an equitable and reasonable manner. In particular, an international watercourse shall be used and developed by watercourse States with a view of attaining optimal and sustainable utilization thereof and benefits therefrom, taking into account the interests of the watercourse States concerned, consistent with adequate protection of the watercourse."

Article 5.2 follows:

"Watercourse States shall participate in the use, development and protection of an international watercourse in an equitable and reasonable manner. Such participation includes both the right to utilize the watercourse and the duty to cooperate in the protection and development thereof, as provided in the present Convention".

As the commentary to the International Law Commission's Draft Articles on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses makes clear, the fundamental principle of "equality of rights" does not mean that each state is entitled to an equal share of the uses and benefits of the watercourse, nor that the water itself should be divided into identical proportions. Rather, it means that each state is entitled to use and benefit from the watercourse in a equitable manner. The scope of a state's rights of equitable utilization depends on the facts and circumstances of each individual case and, specifically, on a weighing of all relevant factors.

Again, as in the case of the delimitation of the continental shelf, we are confronted with the challenge of determining how to turn the notion of "equitable principles" into tangible results. Article 6.1 of the Convention contains an indicative list of those factors, which include, inter alia:

Geographic, hydrographic, hydrological, climatic, ecological and other factors of natural character;
Social and economic needs of the watercourse States concerned;
Population dependent on the watercourse in each watercourse State

Clearly the relevant factors in the equitable delimitation of the continental shelf are not the same of those to be used in the determination of the equitable use of international watercourses (mainly because the paramount interest of the Convention is the use of freshwater and not of rivers and lakes subsoil or other resources). The different consideration given to social and economic factors is, in this sense, evident.

To summarize, states have not revealed any particular penchant in the delimitation of boundaries over internal lakes. They have resorted indiscriminately to medium lines, Thalweg, astronomical references (i.e. parallels and meridians), and other criteria. Nonetheless, the delimitation of states' sovereignty over most international lakes has taken place mainly between the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century, at a time in which natural resources still appeared to be inexhaustible and largely renewable. Because the evolution of international law since the 1970s has brought to the front and center of the international scene the equitable use of natural resources, nowadays any delimitation of states' sovereignty over contested bodies of water can hardly take place without regard to a general need, if not legal duty, of reaching an equitable solution, which should take account not only of the needs of present but also of future generations.

Be that as it may, it should be stressed that the settlement of boundary disputes involving natural resources, both over marine or land areas, has traditionally centered on the demarcation of specific lines dividing the disputed resource area between the states involved. Yet, modern practice has developed a number of possible alternatives, ranging from the limited case of unification of transboundary deposits to an agreement covering the resources of an entire continent or the joint-development of natural resources.

Conclusions

The current Caspian legal regime, sketched by and large between 1921 and 1940, is wanting and anachronistic. Modern states trace their boundaries with pinpoint accuracy. The determination of the exact geographic limits of state sovereignty more often than not is the prerequisite for the orderly exploitation of natural resources in boundary areas. At the end of the twentieth century, the overwhelming majority of bodies of water have been the object of some kind of partition; those few which are not marked by an international boundary line usually do not conceal vast natural resources.

In like manner, since the introduction, about fifty years ago, of the notion of continental shelf in modern international law (and subsequently of the contiguous zone and the exclusive economic zone as other expressions of sovereignty over the high seas), states have rushed to partition the most promising seabed areas. When they could not come to an agreement, international adjudication has often been resorted to with positive results, thus developing an authoritative case law. While there are still large areas of the high seas where lines have not been drawn, the occurrence of riches eventually seems to be a catalyst of agreement rather than a long-term divide.

Nonetheless, in the Caspian the extension and nature of states' rights and competencies still remain uncertain and subject to unilateral claims. All in all the Caspian is an oddity, whose idiosyncrasy is epitomized by its legal riddles. As this study intended to show, determining the rights and duties of Caspian states by a process of deductive reasoning based on a priori pronouncements on the legal classification of the Caspian (sea, lake or other designation) is a purposeless exercise.

The UNCLOS does not apply to the Caspian because its provisions excluded it from its purview and in any event because, out of all Caspian states, it has been signed and ratified only by Russia. What is left is therefore customary Law of the Sea. Yet, while it can help to clarify the nature of coastal states' rights on the Caspian, by itself it cannot help to determine their spatial extension. Similarly, the analysis of the legal regime of international watercourses, or lakes, does not shed any much more light on where or how boundaries should be traced, nor on the extent of customary competencies of Caspian states within those spatial limits.

For almost a decade, the identification (or creation) of the Caspian legal regime has been left at the mercy of competing geo-economical and geo-political wrangles. Each Caspian state has sought in international law ammunition for the struggle. However, international law does not have ready-made solutions to offer but only models from which they may draw inspiration and general legal principles. This chapter has presented some of them and illustrated how they have been implemented in other circumstances with regard to the issue of the exploration and exploitation of Caspian mineral resources.

It is not possible to wholesale the legal regime of enclosed seas and/or international lakes to the Caspian without due regard to its historical, geo-physical and legal peculiarity. Indeed different regimes suit different factual situations. To illustrate, concerning the rights of non-Caspian states the appropriate place to look for the relevant rules is probably the law applicable to international lakes. For navigation and communication issues (provided that one or more Caspian states have important navigation or communications interests in areas removed from their own shore) the appropriate place to look for relevant rules might be the law applicable to enclosed seas. If the question concerns boundary delimitation, especially in areas more distant from shore, the learning and jurisprudence developed for marine areas is likely to be useful. Partition would seem to be a sensible result for hydrocarbon and mineral deposits, if transport and environmental concerns are accommodated. This solution is indeed supported by overwhelming State practice. Nevertheless, when it comes to scientific research, fisheries conservation and management, and the general protection of the environment, partition is unlikely to protect the full range of interests of Caspian states and, eventually, may hamper their capacity to cooperate effectively.

The Caspian and international law have been for too long strangers to one another, but it is up to Caspian states to reconcile them. Customary international law can fill the cracks but it cannot bear the brunt of the Caspian legal regime. Be that as it may, should the present anarchic situation continue, in absence of a clear legal title effective control of certain areas of the Caspian might ultimately determine the spatial extension of Caspian states' sovereign rights. However, to create a legal title effective control must be undisputed, and unilateral actions are, at best, inconsistent with the behavior required to states involved in diplomatic negotiations, posing, at worst, a major threat to regional peace and security.

[Please, note that this article is a slightly condensed and revised version of a similar article to be published in the forthcoming book Ascher, W. / Mirovitskaya, N. (2000), The Caspian Sea: A Quest for Environmental Security, Kluwer, London. The book contains the proceedings of the NATO Advanced Research Workshop, held in Venice, Italy, on March 15-19, 1999.]

Cesare P.R. Romano

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