Iran ‘serious’ about returning to JCPOA, says top diplomat

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iran is “serious” about resuming faltered negotiations to return to a landmark nuclear deal if other signatories share the same readiness to honor their commitments, its foreign minister told the UN chief on Saturday, with the US previously declaring the deal as “dead.” 

“If the other parties are prepared, we will be serious about returning to the deal so that all parties would resume honoring their commitments,” Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian told UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York City, as reported by Iran’s state IRNA news agency. 

Amir-Abdollahian said that Tehran is in contact with the US to revive the nuclear agreement. 

Under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Iran agreed to curb its nuclear enrichment program in exchange for much-needed relief from crippling sanctions.

But the deal began unraveling in 2018, when Washington, under former US president Donald Trump’s administration, unilaterally withdrew from the accord and re-imposed biting sanctions on the Islamic republic, who in turn began stepping up its nuclear enrichment efforts. 

During the talk with Guterres, Amir-Abdollahian reiterated previous Iranian statements that Tehran does not seek to develop an atomic bomb, saying that such a move goes against the Islamic republic’s doctrine. 

Efforts to revive the deal have bogged down, with the current US administration under President Joe Biden labeling the deal as “dead.” 

On Monday, a prisoner swap took place between Iran and the US in which Iran released five Americans in exchange for five Iranians going the opposite direction and the unfreezing of $6 billion of Iranian funds frozen in South Korea.

The funds were moved to restricted bank accounts in Qatar, where the US said it would supervise the mechanism of how they are spent, purely for humanitarian purposes. 

Amir-Abdollahian also discussed Tehran’s cooperation with the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), saying that “whenever IAEA acts within the technical framework, things move in the right direction.” 

“But when the other parties prefer their political ideals to the IAEA’s professional procedures, the situation gets worse,” he added. 

Last week, the IAEA blasted Iran for withdrawing accreditation from several experienced agency inspectors, calling the decision “disproportionate and unprecedented.”

Tehran in response said that their licenses were withdrawn due to “excessive demands” from the UK, France, Germany, and the US with the “aim of destroying cooperation between Iran and the IAEA” and misusing the watchdog “for their own political purposes.”