Time for Serious Decisions in JCPOA Talks: Iran’s Top Negotiator
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – The time has come for the parties in the Vienna talks on the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal to make their serious decisions, Ali Baqeri, Iran’s lead negotiator said.
“After weeks of intensive talks, we are closer than ever to an agreement; nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, though,” Baqeri said in a post on his Twitter account on Thursday.
“Our negotiating partners need to be realistic, avoid intransigence and heed lessons of past 4yrs.
Time for their serious decisions,” he added.
His remarks echoed those made earlier by Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian to the European Union’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell, in which the top diplomat asserted that a final agreement hinged on the other side’s conduct.
Washington left the JCPOA in 2018 and began to implement what it called the “maximum pressure” campaign of sanctions against the Islamic Republic, depriving the country of the economic benefits of the accord, including the removal of sanctions, for which Iran had agreed to certain caps on its nuclear activities, Press TV reported.
In the meantime, the other parties to the deal, in particular France, Britain and Germany, only paid lip service to safeguarding Iran’s economic dividends as promised under the JCPOA, prompting Iran – after an entire year of “strategic patience” – to reduce its nuclear obligations in a legal move under the deal.
The Vienna talks began last April on the assumption that the US, under the Biden administration, is willing to repeal the Trump administration’s so-called maximum pressure policy.