TEHRAN, Iran (AFP) – European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said during a surprise visit to Tehran on Saturday that talks on resuming the Iran nuclear deal, stalled for three months, would resume in a few days. .
“We will resume talks on the JCPOA in the coming days. I mean quickly, immediately,” Borrell told a news conference in the Iranian capital, referring to the joint comprehensive action plan.
Borrell made the announcement after a two-hour meeting with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdullahian on the second day of his first unannounced visit to the Islamic republic.
Amir-Abdullahian confirmed the resumption of talks.
“We have had long but positive talks on global cooperation between Iran and the European Union,” Amir-Abdullahian said. “We will try to resolve the problems and differences through dialogue that will resume soon.”
The Iran nuclear deal has been hanging by a thread since 2018 when then US President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from the deal and began imposing economic sanctions on America’s arch-enemy.
Robert Malle, the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran, testifies about the JCPOA during a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Capitol Hill on May 25, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Brendan Smailowski/AFP)
Israel is strongly opposed to a return to the 2015 accord, against which it campaigned at the time of its signing, seeing Iran as unreliable and unable to fulfill its commitments.
Successive Israeli governments have warned for decades that Iran wants to build nuclear weapons.
Current US President Joe Biden’s administration has called for a return to the deal, saying it would be the best course of action with the Islamic Republic.
Talks began in April last year but stalled in March amid differences between Tehran and Washington, particularly over Iran’s demand to remove its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps from the US terror list.
‘meaningful diplomacy’
According to the EU coordinator for talks, Enrique Mora, on the eve of Borrell’s visit, the US point of view on Iran, Robert Mali, over a meal with the EU’s diplomatic chief, “reiterated US commitment to getting back to the deal”. .
“We remain committed to the path of meaningful diplomacy in consultation with our European partners,” Male said in a tweet.
France, one of six world powers that agreed to a 2015 deal, on Friday urged Iran to “seize this diplomatic opportunity to end it while it is still possible.”
Amir-Abdullahian said on Thursday that Iran was “serious” about reaching an agreement, calling for “realism from the US side”.
Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdullahian speaks during the 51st annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, WEF, in Davos, Switzerland, Thursday, May 26, 2022. (Laurent Gillieron/Keystone via AP)
The nuclear deal with six major powers – Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the US – gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for a guarantee that it could not develop nuclear weapons.
Iran has always denied wanting a nuclear arsenal.
cameras removed
In April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the US still believes a withdrawal to the agreement is “the best way to address the nuclear challenge posed by Iran.”
Blinken warned at the time that the “breakout time” for Iran to develop a nuclear bomb if it so chooses was “down in a matter of weeks” after the deal went ahead by more than a year.
The International Atomic Energy Agency’s board of governors adopted a resolution this month for failing to adequately explain Iran’s previous discovery of traces of enriched uranium at three sites that Tehran did not declare as a host to nuclear activities. was.
That same day, on June 8, Tehran said it had cut off several IAEA cameras that were monitoring its nuclear sites.
Example: Photographer and TV cameraman watches a demonstration of a surveillance camera used in Iran during a press conference by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director-General Rafael Grossi, at the agency’s headquarters in Vienna, Austria. It’s about the situation. June 09, 2022. (Joe Chalmers/AFP)
IAEA chief Rafael Grossi later confirmed that 27 cameras had been hacked, with about 40 still in place.
He warned that Iran’s move could deal a “fatal blow” to talks unless inspectors from the UN nuclear watchdog were given access within three to four weeks.
Borel’s visit, his first to Tehran since February 2020, could be a determining factor in the deal’s fate.
During talks in Vienna aimed at reviving the deal, Iran has repeatedly sought guarantees from the Biden administration that there will be no repeat of Trump’s backlash.
Meanwhile, tensions between Israel and Iran have intensified in recent weeks after the killing of a top Iranian official in Tehran last month that it blames on several other deaths of security and scientific personnel in Israel and Iran.
CNN informed of Last week that Israel kept the US in the dark over its covert operations, which included targeted killings and sabotage against Iran’s nuclear program.
