Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Nasser Kanaani has said that Tehran “sees no need” for a new deal on its nuclear programme.
At a weekly press conference in the Iranian capital Tehran on Monday, Kanaani made the remarks in response to calls from the West to modify the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and the world powers, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and to negotiate a new one.
“Ideas such as the JCPOA 2 and the likes of it are put forward by parties that have not been committed to their obligations and, as time passes by, they seek to justify their inaction” by proposing such ideas, he added.
He stressed that Iran had fulfilled all of its commitments under the JCPOA, adding parties that failed to honour their obligations had no right to bring up issues such as the JCPOA 2, Xinhua news agency reported.
Kanaani emphasised that the other parties needed to demonstrate their sincerity and readiness to return to the JCPOA within the framework of their accepted commitments, which had been stipulated in the 2015 deal, while adhering to Tehran’s red lines. Iran, he said, had never closed the path of diplomacy and negotiation and had acted and remained within that framework.
In an interview published by the Financial Times on November 30, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency Rafael Grossi urged world powers to relaunch talks with Iran and “not lose sight of the risks posed by its stockpiling of enriched uranium while attention has turned to the war between Israel and Hamas”.
He added talks with Iran “might require a new framework, rather than an attempt to revive the 2015 accord, noting, “Trying to put (a nuclear deal) back into the JCPOA box wouldn’t work. You can still call it a JCPOA but it should be a JCPOA 2.0 or something because you have to adapt.”
Iran signed the JCPOA with world powers in July 2015, agreeing to put some curbs on its nuclear programme in return for the removal of the sanctions on the country. The US, however, pulled out of the deal in May 2018 and reimposed its unilateral sanctions on Tehran, prompting the latter to drop some of its nuclear commitments under the deal.
The negotiations for the revival of the JCPOA commenced in April 2021 in Austria’s capital Vienna. Despite several rounds of talks, no significant breakthrough has been achieved since the end of the last round in August 2022.
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