Iran Nuclear Talks Make ’Very Good Progress’
British Foreign Minister William Hague has said global powers negotiating with Iran over its nuclear programme must "seize the moment" as talks enter an unscheduled third day.
Six world powers - the US, Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany - are working on a deal to cap some of Iran's atomic programme in exchange for limited relief from economic sanctions.
As delegates arrived on Saturday, Mr Hague told reporters: "We are very conscious of the fact that real momentum has built up in these negotiations and there is now real concentration on these negotiations and so we have to do everything we can to seize the moment.
However, he cautioned that it was not clear whether a deal could be reached by the end of the day.
Iran's deputy foreign minister Abbas Araqchi also said that if there was not a deal on Saturday then any remaining issues would have to be carried out over to another date.
"There is greater agreement on some issues and less agreement on other issues," he told the ISNA news agency.
France's Laurent Fabius said the sticking points were a call for Iran to halt operations at its Arak research reactor - a potential producer of bomb-grade plutonium - while the negotiating process continues and questions about Iran's stock of uranium enriched to 20%.
Both issues reflect Western concerns that Iran is enriching uranium for use in atomic weapons rather than in a civilian nuclear energy programme as it claims.
US Secretary of State John Kerry, who cut short a Middle East tour to attend the talks in Geneva, Switzerland, had also struck a note of caution after a five-hour meeting drew to a close last night.
"There is not an agreement at this point," Mr Kerry told reporters. "There are still some very important issues on the table that are unresolved."
Earlier on Friday, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov raised hopes after he said the six countries and Iran could agree a "road map" to end the differences over the programme at the talks.
He told reporters he did not wish to prejudge the outcome but said Iran should be allowed to have a peaceful nuclear programme under the watch of the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Unlike previous encounters between Iran and Western powers in the past decade, all sides have remained quiet about details of the negotiations, without the criticism and mutual allegations of a lack of seriousness that have been typical of such meetings in the past.
Diplomats involved in the talks say this is a sign of how serious all sides are.
If some sort of agreement is reached, it would be a breakthrough after a decade of negotiations between Iran and the six world powers.
A potential deal could see Tehran freeze its nuclear efforts for as long as six months in exchange for some relief from the sanctions that have battered its economy.
But Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Friday that his country "utterly rejects" a deal being forged, adding that "Israel will do everything it needs to do to defend itself and defend the security of its people".