Turkmenistan, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan signed the final Additional Protocol to the Agreement on the Establishment of an International Transport and Transit Corridor (the Ashgabat Agreement) at the second meeting of the Coordinating Council of the participating countries of this Agreement held in Avaza.

The event took place 11 years after the signing of the Agreement between the Governments of Iran, Oman, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Later, Kazakhstan, Qatar, and India also joined the agreement, and Pakistan's accession is currently under consideration.

In his opening remarks to the meeting, Director General of the Agency for Transport and Communications under the Cabinet of Ministers of Turkmenistan Mammetkhan Chakyev highlighted that official Ashgabat pursues a policy of broad cooperation in the transport sector, having ratified 12 international conventions on transport and initiated the adoption by the UN General Assembly of four resolutions in this field.

The participants of the meeting considered a number of issues related to the simplification of the visa regime for participants of international road transportation, the removal of barriers to the development of bilateral and transit road cargo transportation.

Attention was paid, among other things, to the unification and definition of a single end-to-end tariff in rail freight transportation, as well as the parity amounts of fees and payments charged when crossing state borders for transport services related to road transportation.

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