Iran International
Iran is moving to ratify the Caspian treaty it left dormant for seven years, choosing the depths of a war to settle the status of its one quiet frontier, and reopening the oldest wound in its modern diplomacy: the belief that Tehran signed away half a sea.
President Masoud Pezeshkian's government has sent the 2018 Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea to parliament for ratification, ending years in which the treaty sat untouched and reviving a charged argument over the country's historical rights, energy interests and position in the strategically vital basin.
The convention, signed by the leaders of Iran, Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in the Kazakh port of Aktau in August 2018, takes effect only once all five littoral states ratify it. The other four completed the process long ago. Tehran, alone, held back.
The charge that shadows the bill is older than the bill itself: a belief, widely held in Iran and rooted in readings of its 1921 and 1940 treaties with Moscow, that the country was entitled to half the Caspian and stands to end up with barely a tenth.
The convention in fact allocates no national shares at all, but the ghost of the fifty percent has trailed every Iranian discussion of the sea since Aktau.
The timing sharpens the argument. The move lands in the middle of a war that has set Iran's southern coast under nightly strikes and closed the Strait of Hormuz, leaving the Caspian corridor to Russia carrying an outsized share of the country's commerce and its strategic weight.
What the treaty actually does is narrower than either its champions or its critics suggest.
It defines the Caspian as a "special and unique landlocked body of water," placing it outside the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Each coastal state receives 15 nautical miles of fully sovereign territorial waters and a further 10 nautical miles of exclusive fishing rights, with the remaining surface designated a shared navigation zone.
The wealth, however, is postponed. Article 8 leaves ownership and delimitation of the seabed and its oil and gas to "bilateral or multilateral agreements between the states concerned."
Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan have largely settled their boundaries in the sea's north; the lines involving Iran, Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan remain unresolved, tangled in the complexity of dividing energy-rich waters.
A century-old dispute over Iran's share
Before the Soviet collapse, the Caspian was governed by the 1921 and 1940 treaties between Tehran and Moscow, which recognized equal navigation and fishing rights but drew no maritime boundaries.
The Soviet breakup turned two littoral states into five, and Iran has argued since that the sea should be divided equally, 20 percent to each.
Russia, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan instead adopted a modified median-line method, a formula that, because of Iran's concave coastline, would shrink Tehran's share of the sea and its bed to roughly 11 to 13 percent. Iran has never accepted that division.
The government's case: a sealed northern flank
The government presents ratification as completing the Caspian's legal framework, deepening cooperation among the littoral states and, above all, keeping outside powers away.
Officials point to Article 3, which bars the armed forces of non-coastal countries from the Caspian, as the convention's central security prize, a provision long championed by both Tehran and Moscow.
Defa Press, an outlet affiliated with Iran's armed forces, wrote that the clause would "turn Iran's northern borders into a secure region, far removed from scenarios of foreign military intervention," at a moment when the country faces pressure along its southern and western frontiers.
The critics' case: ratifying before the real negotiation
Opponents argue parliament is sequencing the deal backwards: locking in the framework before the seabed, where the money lies, has been divided.
They note that the northern states have already parceled out much of the seabed and pressed ahead with oil and gas development, while fields shared with Iran, including Alborz, remain in limbo.
Dariush Safarnejad, an international affairs analyst, told the Revolutionary Guards-linked Javan newspaper that lawmakers should return the bill to the government, since supplementary agreements that were meant to be completed within six months of the 2018 signing have never been finalized.
Approving the convention without them, he warned, "could provide other Caspian states with legal grounds in the future and influence the security, political and geopolitical dynamics of the Caspian region."
Shoaib Bahman, an international relations analyst focused on Eurasia, told the same paper that ratifying before the seabed boundaries are set would "effectively reduce Iran's legal leverage in future negotiations and could undermine its claim to a 20% share of the Caspian Sea."
Pipelines, corridors and the Turkic map
The critics' second front is Article 14, under which undersea pipelines require the consent only of the states whose sectors they cross, not all five. Bahman argued the clause could open the way for eastern Caspian producers to export oil and gas directly toward Europe, eroding Iran's transit position.
Mehdi Seif-Tabrizi, a Russia specialist, offered a more measured reading to the news website Fararu. Iran's 15 miles of territorial waters and 10 miles of fishing rights are guaranteed, he said, and "the real dispute concerns the seabed and subsoil," not the surface percentages that dominate the public argument.
Yet he shares the strategic worry: that the long-discussed Trans-Caspian pipeline from Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan to Azerbaijan could finally be built.
"That could strengthen Azerbaijan's position and, in turn, reinforce the Zangezur corridor and the so-called Turkic World project," he said. "If Iran ratifies the convention, it would remove one of the most important legal obstacles to implementing those projects."
The opposition joins the attack
Criticism has come from beyond the establishment's factions. Exiled Prince Reza Pahlavi wrote on X that ratifying the agreement without the Iranian people's mandate and without "a clear and comprehensive guarantee of Iran's historic rights" is "deeply concerning and constitutes a serious threat to Iran's national interests."
Iran's rights in the Caspian, he added, "are not negotiable, nor can they be relinquished. Any action that undermines these rights will be recorded in the historical memory of the Iranian nation, and those responsible will ultimately be held accountable by the people of Iran."
Saeed Ghasseminejad, a senior Pahlavi adviser, went further, alleging that Hassan Rouhani's government had already "ceded Iran's share of the Caspian Sea" and that Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf now seek to "legalize and make that concession permanent."
He called the move "the biggest surrender of Iran's land and waters to foreign powers since the Qajar-era humiliations."
Judiciary spokesperson Asghar Jahangir said on Saturday that legal proceedings began immediately after Kharrazi's recent remarks and that he had now been summoned to the court, which handles cases involving members of the clergy.
“Immediately after his recent remarks, legal action was initiated to prosecute him,” Jahangir said, adding that Kharrazi's case was under criminal investigation and further details would be released after the proceedings.
‘Islamic Republic doesn't work anymore’
In a video released this week, Kharrazi said the Islamic Republic had “reached a stage where, in this form, it simply doesn't work anymore” and said his organization had already drawn up plans for replacing it with an “Islamic government.”
Kharrazi, who heads the Hezbollah of Iran organization, said his group had produced 60 volumes of plans covering state institutions and had maintained what he described as a “shadow government.”
He also outlined a recruitment drive intended to build a nationwide network of 250,000 supporters, saying it could “surround all the ministries” and converge on Tehran following a single announcement.
“Mr. Khamenei and the government must understand that a 250,000-strong organization stands ready to move,” he said.
Kharrazi also attacked President Masoud Pezeshkian, calling him a “buffoon” who “understands nothing,” and said his government “will not reach its end.”
Claims about Khamenei
Kharrazi is tied by marriage to Iran's ruling family: his sister is married to Masoud Khamenei, a brother of Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei.
He has also presented himself as a longtime confidant of the new supreme leader, saying he has known him for four decades and held numerous private meetings with him. In his latest remarks, Kharrazi said Mojtaba Khamenei's thinking was “far more radical than his father's.” His accounts of private conversations and the supreme leader's views cannot be independently verified.
The leader's office had already publicly rejected earlier remarks Kharrazi attributed to Mojtaba Khamenei, including that Pezeshkian's next resignation would be accepted, describing them as unauthenticated and false.
Pezeshkian described the protests as a "riot" and accused people abroad of falsely inflating the death toll.
"Those sitting abroad who present themselves as intellectuals and scholars, yet say 30,000 or 40,000 people were killed, are dishonorable and traitors," he said in the video interview.
His remarks prompted a wave of criticism from citizens who sent messages to Iran International, with many accusing the president himself of bearing responsibility for the killings.
"Mr. Pezeshkian, this is disgraceful. Stop lying and have some shame," one said. "Your hands are stained with the blood of tens of thousands of Iranian protesters. Curse all of you killers and the remaining figures of the Islamic Republic."
Others argued that even the official death toll acknowledged by his administration warranted accountability.
"Sitting there and saying 3,000 people were killed – first of all, this is not about the number," one citizen from Arak said. "Even if it were those 3,000 people you admit were killed, you should answer for every single one of them."
Another viewer wrote that if Iran had "a normal government," Pezeshkian should face punishment simply for acknowledging that thousands had been killed.
"So if, by your own account, 3,000 people were killed, that's acceptable?" another message read.
Government figures disputed
In mid-February, Pezeshkian's office published a list containing the names of 2,986 people it said were killed during the January protests, saying it had been compiled using data from the Legal Medicine Organization and cross-checked with the National Organization for Civil Registration.
The figure is far below Iran International's editorial board estimate of at least 36,500 people killed during the crackdown. Several international media outlets have also cited similar estimates.
Pezeshkian has repeatedly accused protesters of carrying out armed attacks and sabotage.
In his latest interview, he again described protesters as having been armed by US President Donald Trump, referred to the crackdown as an "incident" and said demonstrations had turned into a "riot" in which "difficult events" occurred.
One person responded by invoking a Quranic verse.
"If your memory serves you, the Quran you probably believe in says killing one innocent person is like killing all humanity," the message read. "Yet you speak about 3,000 deaths as though nothing important happened."
Another accused the president of contradicting earlier official accounts.
"It is interesting that you say terrorists killed the victims, yet you become angry at those who say the real figure is 40,000 and call them traitors," he wrote. "That amounts to admitting that the terrorists you blamed were actually yourselves."
Activists challenge official narrative
Human rights activist and former political prisoner Mehdi Mahmoudian also criticized Pezeshkian's remarks.
"Please explain who killed the several thousand people whose deaths you yourself do not deny, and what those responsible for this crime should be called," Mahmoudian wrote.
Separately, critics resurfaced comments by Mojtaba Lotfi, a cleric and former aide to the late Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, who argued that the government's casualty list had been censored.
Referring to his hometown of Najafabad, Lotfi wrote that local records indicated at least 30 victims from the city had been omitted from the official list, suggesting the government's figures were incomplete.
