MOSCOW. July 21 (Interfax-AVN) - Moscow doubts that the moratorium on the expansion of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will be lifted at the forthcoming meeting of SCO foreign ministers in Dushanbe.
"I doubt that the moratorium will be fully lifted. In principle, it can be lifted, but what's next? I do not think that this could be done in the nearest future," a diplomatic source told Interfax in Moscow on Monday.
SCO does not have a clear procedure of expanding the organization, he said. "To date, we have no clear regulations for admitting new members into the organization," the source said.
It is even unclear whether the candidate nation must first ratify the SCO Charter or whether it must first join the organization and then pass the appropriate documents, he said.
Commenting on the information that Iran is one of the SCO key candidate members, the source said: "Formally, they applied in a proper way, but we have no documents regulating the process. They have yet to be prepared."
Formally, Iran is the not first SCO candidate member, as "Pakistan applied earlier than the Iranians," he also said.
The SCO consists of Russia, China, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. SCO's observer nations are Mongolia, Iran, India and Pakistan.