Iran Seeks to Exclude Israel from the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-Building Measures in Asia (CICA)

Kazem Gharibabadi, Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs, said Tehran expects CICA member states to adopt a principled and coherent approach to any military aggression, based on international law.

Tunisia, October 15. /TASS/. According to Ambassador Arjan, Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran's Deputy Legal and International Minister of Foreign Affairs, said at the CICA meeting in Baku: Israel should be removed from the Conference on Interaction and Confidence Building Measures in Asia (CICA).

"The most important source of insecurity and instability in Asia, especially in the West Asia region, is [Israel]. It is time to remove [the country] from the CICA mechanism," he said.

Gharibabadi said: Tehran expects SICA member states to adopt a principled and coherent approach to any military aggression based on international laws, regardless of who is the aggressor and the victim.

CICA is a multilateral dialogue format to discuss important regional issues and develop cooperation between member states in order to strengthen trust in the military-political, economic and humanitarian fields, as well as in the field of new challenges and threats. The initiative to establish this conference was proposed in 1992 by Nursultan Nazarbayev, the then president of Kazakhstan. CICA consists of 28 countries and 15 observers.