TUNIS, October 15. /TASS/. Israel should be excluded from the Conference on Interaction and Confidence·Building Measures in Asia (CICA), Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s Deputy Foreign Minister for Legal and International Affairs, told the CICA summit in Baku, according to ISNA agency.
"The most important source of insecurity and instability in Asia, especially in the Western Asia region, is [Israel]. It is time to exclude [it] from the CICA mechanism," he said.
Gharibabadi said that Tehran expects the CICA member states to adopt a principled and consistent approach to any military aggression based on international law, regardless of who is the aggressor and who is the victim.
CICA is a multilateral dialogue format for discussing pressing regional issues and developing cooperation among the member states to boost trust in the military-political, economic, and humanitarian spheres, as well as in the area of new challenges and threats. The initiative to establish the conference was put forward in 1992 by Nursultan Nazarbayev, the then president of Kazakhstan. The CICA includes 28 countries and 15 observers.