Rouhani: Iran to continue Vienna talks until final agreement

President Hassan Rouhani said Sunday Iran will continue talks with world powers in Vienna until a “final agreement” is hammered out to resuscitate the 2015 nuclear deal.

“We will continue the negotiations until [reaching] a final agreement,” Rouhani said at a meeting of the Government’s Economic Coordination Headquarters in Tehran.

Iran and the remaining parties to the nuclear agreement – Britain, France, Germany, Russia and China – have held several round of talks in the Austrian capital since early April to restore balance to the troubled accord, known as the JCPOA.

The accord has been unravelling since former US president Donald Trump ditched it in 2018 and reimposed sanctions on Iran as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign to force Iran to agree to a “better deal”. 

The unilateral withdrawal prompted Iran to gradually drop its commitments under the JCPOA a year later in retaliation.

Trump’s successor, Joe Biden has expressed his willingness to bring the US back to deal.

Rouhani said Sunday that the US has clearly voiced its readiness to remove the sanctions during the ongoing talks.

Hailing the Iranian people’s resistance in the face of an “economic war”, Rouhani pointed out that even the US government acknowledges that the policy of “maximum pressure” has failed.

Rouhani said production growth figures relating to Iran’s industry prove the failure of that hostile policy against the country.

“Production growth figures in various industrial sectors of the country are the best evidence of the ineffectiveness of the US maximum pressure policy,” he said

The talks in the Austrian capital are also attended by the US, but Tehran and Washington are not in direct contact, Press TV wrote.

The fifth round of the talks, which will begin in the coming days, is widely speculated to be the last one, as participants noted the “good” progress that was made in the fourth round and said an agreement is “within reach”.

A US State Department official said negotiators made "meaningful progress” in the latest round of discussions to rehabilitate the JCPOA.

Also, President Rouhani said on Thursday that the participants had agreed to remove all main sanctions targeting the country’s oil, petrochemical, shipping and insurance sectors as well as the Central Bank of Iran.

‘Conditional’ extension

Meanwhile, IRNA reported on Sunday that the International Atomic Energy Agency could get a one-month extension of its monitoring and verification deal in Iran, citing a source at Iran's Supreme National Security Council.

To give diplomacy a chance, the watchdog and Iran agreed in February to keep “necessary” IAEA monitoring and verification activities in the Islamic Republic.

The three-month monitoring agreement that allowed the agency to access to images of Iran’s nuclear sites expired on Saturday.

“It is likely the agreement will be extended conditionally for one month," the source said. "If this decision is final, it is expected that the other side facilitate the process of reaching an agreement [on JCPOA] by accepting Iran's legal demands."

Iran's national TV also quoted an unnamed official saying that the agreement between the agency and Tehran could be extended.

"If extended for a month and if during this period major powers ... accept Iran's legal demands, then the data will be handed over to the agency. Otherwise the images will be deleted forever," the official said.

Source: Iran Daily