Diplomats representing Iran and the remaining parties to the JCPOA are proceeding with negotiations in Austria to weigh plans on the lifting of the US sanctions against Tehran, which has ruled out the possibility of striking an interim deal.
Iran and the remaining participants to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (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.
On Sunday, the 29th day of the eighth round of Iran and P4+1 talks in Vienna, Iran’s lead negotiator Ali Baqeri and Enrique Mora, the European Union’s deputy foreign policy chief and head of the JCPOA Joint Commission, held a meeting. Later in the day, the top Iranian diplomat met with delegates of the P4+1 group of countries.
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.
During the new round of talks, Iran has rejected the notion of setting timelines for achieving an agreement, with its representatives noting that they prefer to clinch a logical accord within a logical period of time. Iran has also made its agreement to a new accord conditional on the realization of the Iranian nation’s rights and interests, Press TV reported.
As a result, the Iranian negotiating team has said time and again that achieving an interim deal is out of the question as Tehran seeks a sustainable, reliable and definitive agreement on the removal of sanctions imposed on the country.
The Islamic Republic has also rejected the pessimistic assessment of the talks by the US and the European trio – namely France, Britain, and Germany – as a psychological ploy to win concessions.
While the Iranian side has entered the new round of talks with clear-cut positions and well-define principles, the Western side, on the contrary, has proved to be riddled with many rifts and differences among them. The differences not only exist between the remaining members of the JCPOA and the United States, but even within the American team, which has been following the talks without being part of them.
Source: Iranian media (edited by Al-Manar English Website)
