Shamkhani Urges Effective Removal of Sanctions on Iran


TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani emphasized that all sanctions against the country must be lifted effectively so that Tehran would benefit from the JCPOA.

“Economic & technological capacities of the country have an integrated structure & lifting of sanctions should be same for all sectors,” the senior security official said in a tweet on Tuesday.

“Previous experience has shown that without effective lifting of sanctions, sustainable economic benefits from JCPOA are like an illusion,” he added.

Iran and the remaining participants to the JCPOA have been holding talks in Vienna since April last year with the aim of reviving the deal by bringing the US into full compliance.

The US left the JCPOA in May 2018 under former president Donald Trump. The Vienna talks began on a promise by Trump’s successor, Joe Biden, to rejoin the deal and repeal the so-called maximum pressure campaign against Iran. Biden, however, has so far failed to undo Trump’s own undoing of Barack Obama’s Iran policy, which led to the JCPOA in June 2015.

The eighth round of the Vienna talks began on December 27 with a focus on the removal of all sanctions that the United States had imposed on Iran after its unilateral withdrawal from the JCPOA. The US is not allowed to directly attend the talks due to its pullout in 2018 from the deal with Iran.