RPT: PREVIEW - Astana-12 Talks On Syria To Make Fresh Attempt To Launch Constitutional Committee

NUR-SULTAN (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th April, 2019) SULTAN, April 25 (Sputnik) - The new, twelfth, round of talks on Syria will open in the Kazakh capital Nur-Sultan on Thursday and will bring together some old and some new participants in order to make a fresh attempt to launch Syria's constitutional committee as well as to discuss other issues pertaining to the settlement.

Astana-12, which will run through Friday, will be the first round of talks in this format for UN Special Envoy for Syria Geir Pedersen, who started his duty on January 9. The Kazakh Foreign Ministry has already confirmed that he accepted the invitation to participate in the talks.

Seeking to make it more representative, the delegation of Syrian opposition will also include several new members such as Rami Doush, the head of the Syrian Tribal Council, some prominent Kurdish figures, as well as another woman, according to the head of the delegation, Ahmad Tomah.

This step can also be a sign of the preparation for a substantial discussion of the constitutional committee - the body that, once created, is supposed to broadly represent various elements of the Syrian society.

Damascus will be traditionally represented by Syria's Envoy to the United Nations in New York Bashar Jaafari.

Three ceasefire guarantor states - Russia, Turkey and Iran - are sending high-level delegations. The Russian team is usually headed by Special Presidential Envoy for Syria Alexander Lavrentyev and also comprises Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Vershinin, the Turkish delegation will be led by Foreign Ministry's Deputy Minister Sedat Onal, and the Iranian delegation will be headed by Ali Asghar Khaji, newly-appointed senior assistant for political affairs.

Three guarantor states are likely to discuss the issue of other countries' joining Astana format talks.

It has already been raised earlier, and China, Germany, Iraq, Jordan and Lebanon were named as possible new members.

The most important topic, however, is likely to be constitutional committee - the body that is expected to draft Syria's new constitution. Its creation was agreed upon during the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in the Russian resort city of Sochi in late January 2018. The committee will consist of three groups representing the Syrian government, opposition, and civil society.

Although there have been many talks about its creation, all attempts so far have been fruitless, since the stakeholders - guarantor states and the UN mainly - cannot agree on its final composition, which is supposed to be 150 members (50 for each segment). The civil society part, or the so-called middle Third, has been the most troublesome. In February, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov said the United Nations believed six people in the list of candidates for the Syrian constitutional committee should be replaced.

"Astana-12 will most likely address the issue of the constitutional committee. Since it has reached an impasse, they can probably consider how to move it more to the competence of the Astana format," Mahmoud Afandi, a representative of the Syrian opposition, told Sputnik.

According to the Kazakh Foreign Ministry, other issues on the agenda of the Astana-12 talks are the developments on the ground in Idlib and in northeastern Syria, measures to further strengthen confidence between the parties to the conflict, the assistance with the return of refugees and post-conflict restoration.

Moreover, a working group on prisoner exchanges, which includes UN and International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) experts, will meet for its regular session during the high-level meeting in Nur-Sultan.