OREANDA-NEWS. The Syrian constitutional committee could have earned at the end of last year, if the West had not impeded its launch. This was announced on Monday by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, speaking to students and faculty of the Moscow State Institute of International Relations and the Diplomatic Academy of the Russian Foreign Ministry on the occasion of the start of the school year.

“If our Western colleagues were nevertheless guided by tasks that were more in the interests of the settlement, then the constitutional committee would already have begun to work at the end of last year - the beginning of this year”, he said. According to Lavrov, in spite of artificially created obstacles, the countries - guarantors of the Astana process (Russia, Iran, Turkey) are doing everything possible to find a composition of the constitutional committee that suits everyone.

“There's literally one or two last names. To be honest, it's very funny, by and large, to cling to one or two last names out of 150 in a situation where decision-making in this kind of committee, it’s already agreed, will be based on the principle of consensus or , if it's impossible to reach consensus, it is necessary to get 75% of the vote, that is, any member of this constitutional committee — the government part, part from the opposition, and part from civil society — can block undesirable decisions for themselves, and in such a situation nations to cling to one or two surnames aren't very serious", the minister said.

The decision to establish the Syrian constitutional committee was made at the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in January 2018. Last week, Special Envoy of the UN Secretary General for Syria Geir Pedersen said that the committee could be created before the end of September.