United Nations, Feb 16: The United Nations is calling on Iran to fully cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), UN spokesman Farhan Haq said, commenting on Tehran’s plan to limit IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities.
Mojtaba Zonnour, the head of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee at the Iranian parliament, has said that if European countries did not resolve the issue of US sanctions against Iran’s banking and finance industry and did not facilitate the normalization of Iranian oil exports by February 21, Tehran would limit its cooperation with the IAEA.
Iranian Permanent Representative to international organizations in Vienna Kazem Gharib Abadi said on Monday that the IAEA had been informed about Tehran’s plans to limit inspections and that a relevant act of parliament was going to be executed on February 23.
UN spokesman Farhan Haq said at a Monday briefing that the United Nations was calling on all sides to adhere to the Iran nuclear deal. “We want all sides to fulfill their obligations, including Iran,” Haq said.
Earlier this month, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that the United States must remove sanctions imposed on Iran and return to the nuclear deal if it really wants to discontinue with the policies of former US President Donald Trump. Zarif emphasized that at the end of February Tehran was going to reduce the presence of UN inspectors in the country, but “that doesn’t mean that the window is fully shut.”
In December, members of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA, or the Iran nuclear deal) expressed their readiness to support the potential return of the US to the agreement, something that was considered highly likely after the inauguration of Joe Biden who was US vice president at the time the nuclear deal was negotiated.
In 2015, Iran signed the JCPOA with the P5+1 group of countries (the United States, China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom – plus Germany) and the European Union. It required Iran to scale back its nuclear program and severely downgrade its uranium reserves in exchange for sanctions relief, including lifting the arms embargo five years after the deal’s adoption. In 2018, the US abandoned its conciliatory stance on Iran, withdrawing from the JCPOA and implementing hard-line policies against Tehran, prompting Iran to largely abandon its obligations under the accord.
In December, Iran passed a law to increase its uranium enrichment and stop UN inspections of its nuclear sites in response to the killing of nuclear physicist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. At the start of January, Iran’s atomic energy organization announced that the country had succeeded in enriching uranium at 20 percent at the Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant.
(AGENCIES)
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