Iran Seeks Full, Verifiable Removal of All Sanctions through Vienna Talks - Top Negotiator

By Staff, Agencies

Iran’s top negotiator in the forthcoming talks in the Austrian capital on the removal of illegal sanctions imposed on the country Ali Baqeri-Kani said Tehran’s main goal is to secure a full and verifiable removal of all sanctions through the Vienna negotiations.

Baqeri-Kani’s remarks were made in an article published by the Financial Times on Sunday in which he slammed Western countries, especially the United States, for using talks as a tool to restrict Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.

“Western countries, in particular the US, work tirelessly to portray ‘negotiations’ as merely a process to restrict Iran’s legitimate and peaceful nuclear program, which is enshrined in international treaties and watched by oversight organizations,” he said.

The Iranian negotiator then emphasized that the Islamic Republic, however, seeks to achieve two goals through engaging in Vienna talks.

“In this vein, we have two goals: the first is to gain a full, guaranteed and verifiable removal of the sanctions that have been imposed on the Iranian people. Without this, the process will continue indefinitely,” Baqeri-Kani said.

He then noted that Iran’s second goal is “to facilitate the legal rights of the Iranian nation to benefit from peaceful nuclear knowledge, especially the all-important enrichment technology for industrial purposes, according to the terms of the international Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT].”

Baqeri-Kani left Tehran for Vienna on Saturday to attend the seventh round of talks that are intended to bring the US back to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA], commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal.

A return to the JCPOA would mean Washington needs to remove its unlawful sanctions on Tehran, three years after the US left the 2015 accord and unleashed a “maximum pressure” campaign on the Islamic Republic.

The US withdrawal came while the International Atomic Energy Agency [IAEA] had issued 15 consecutive reports certifying Iran’s full compliance with its nuclear obligations under the JCPOA.

The Islamic Republic’s unwavering position on the verifiable removal of US sanctions, observers say, stems from the fact that the US started to impose new rounds of sanctions on Iran merely a day after the JCPOA’s implementation date.

It also took the US Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control [OFAC] seven months to grant Airbus and Boeing partial permission to sell planes to Iran. Even then, Iran received only three out of 117 Airbus passenger aircraft it ordered and none from Boeing.

The significant noncompliance of the other parties, in particular the US, prompted Iran to invoke the “dispute resolution mechanism” several times both before and after the US withdrawal from the nuclear pact.