Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

Iran Says Nuclear Talks to Resume in Vienna Soon


Tue 21 Sep 2021 | 08:18 PM
Ahmad El-Assasy

Iran said discussions with parties to the 2015 nuclear deal would restart in a few weeks, but that no consultations with international powers would take place this week on the margins of the UN General Assembly in New York.

This has been revealed by Saeed Khatibzadeh, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry as U.S. President Joe Biden said in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly that if Tehran follows suit, Washington will return to the nuclear deal "in full" and "engage Iran diplomatically."

The Vienna discussions "will resume shortly and over the next few weeks," Khatibzadeh said, according to the state news agency IRNA. "Every meeting requires prior coordination and the development of an agenda," he said.

In Vienna, Iran attended six rounds of discussions with world countries in the hopes of restoring the nuclear deal, which former US President Donald Trump scrapped in 2018. When Iran's hardline President Ebrahim Raisi was elected in June, the talks were put on hold.

Trump reimposed tough sanctions on Iran, causing the country to gradually break its promises under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The JCPOA's original signatories are the United States, China, Russia, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Iran.

Josep Borrell, European Union's Foreign Policy Leader, stated on September 20 that he will meet with his new Iranian counterpart, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, on the fringes of the United Nations this week.

"After the elections, the new presidency asked for the delay in order to fully take stock of the negotiations and understand better everything about this very sensitive file," Borrell said. "The summer has already passed by and we expect that the talks can be resuming soon in Vienna."