JCPOA Joint Commission to convene on July 21: Iranian official

EghtesadOnline: A senior Iranian official says a new meeting of the Joint Commission monitoring the implementation of the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and six other countries will be held in the Austrian capital, Vienna, later this month.

News ID: ۷۴۲۶۷۵

11 July 2017

Abbas Araqchi, who is Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs and the head of the Iranian task force to monitor the implementation of the deal, told reporters on Tuesday that the meeting had been scheduled for July 21, according to PressTV.

He made the remarks prior to his talks with visiting Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov.

Araqchi said Ryabkov was in Tehran for political consultations, adding that they would discuss in advance issues that were to be raised at the upcoming Joint Commission meeting.

Among those issues, he said, were failures on the part of the United States to meet its commitments under the nuclear deal as well as the new US administration’s moves directed against the accord.

The nuclear agreement, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), was inked between Iran and the P5+1 countries — namely the US, Russia, China, France, Britain, and Germany — in July 2015 and took effect in January 2016.

Under the deal, which was later endorsed by a UN Security Council resolution, limits were put on Iran’s nuclear activities in exchange for the removal of all nuclear-related sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic, among other things.

The administration of US President Donald Trump, which took over in January 2017, one year after the JCPOA came into force, has been skeptical of the deal, which was negotiated under his predecessor, Barack Obama.

During his presidential campaign, Trump described the nuclear accord with Iran as a “disaster” and vowed to unilaterally scrap it. While he has not carried out that threat, his administration is conducting a “review” to see whether the provision of sanctions relief to Iran — a US commitment under the deal — is in America’s “national interest.”

Elsewhere in his comments, Araqchi referred to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s upcoming trip to New York, where he would attend the United Nations High-level Political Forum on Sustainable Development.

The top Iranian diplomat will hold bilateral meetings with officials from the P5+1 countries, Araqchi said, explaining that a meeting with the US side, if held, would be within the framework of talks regarding the JCPOA.

“We would have no further contact [with the Americans] beyond that,” he said.