Top Iran Lawmaker Reiterates Demand To Remove IRGC Sanctions
Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) logo
Iran’s parliament has reiterated Tehran’s demand to remove the IRGC from the US list of terrorist entities, as one of the necessary measures to revive the JCPOA nuclear deal.
The spokesman of the parliament's National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, Mahmoud Abbaszadeh-Meshkini, said on Sunday all the Islamic Republic’s demands in the Vienna talks should be met.
"When we say the lifting of all sanctions, it means institutions, companies and individuals; removing the Revolutionary Guard (IRGC) from the list of terrorist organizations is also one of the expectations of the Islamic Republic", he said.
Abbaszadeh-Meshkini added that there are five or six issues left in the Vienna talks, which are important and sensitive priorities for the Islamic Republic, noting that these are the country’s red lines.
Last week, 250 out of 290 members of parliament issued a statement urging President Ebrahim Raisi not to agree to any new nuclear deal without ensuring Iran's demands.
Iran has been insisting to obtain a political guarantee from the United States that it would not renege on a new nuclear agreement, and remove all sanctions imposed on Iran, whether for nuclear or other reasons, such as human rights violations or terrorism. The US has said it will remove only nuclear related sanctions.
Earlier In February, Israel urged the US not to remove the IRGC from its list of terrorist groups, saying the IRGC – which has been designated as a terror group since 2019 -- sponsors Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the Houthis.
Iran said on Sunday it will not accept any deadline set by the West in negotiations to revive its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Tehran also and "politically-motivated" claims by UN watchdog IAEA about its past nuclear work to be dropped, Iranian state TV reported.
Iran International reported on Saturday that according to Western and Iranian foreign ministry sources, the United States has given Iran an “immediate deadline” to respond to a final offer it has received in the framework of talks in Vienna.
The West has been warning Iran that time is running out to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement known as JCPOA, while Tehran is enriching more uranium.
According to some of these sources, meetings held in Tehran to make a decision ended inconclusively, while chief negotiator Ali Bagheri-Kani will return to Vienna Sunday night. Iran said Sunday that he will go back to the Austrain capital to “pursue the talks.”
The foreign ministry also demanded on Sunday the International Atomic Energy Agency end its investigation of Tehran’s clandestine nuclear activities in the early 2000s. "We have answered the agency's (IAEA) questions or politically-motivated claims ... that we think were baseless. These dossiers should be closed," Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Saeed Khatibzadeh said, according to state TV's website. "Iran accepts no deadlines."
The IAEA has found traces of fissile material in different sites in Iran and has submitted questions but has not received satisfying explanations.
The head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) says the country plans to invest $50 billion for building new nuclear power plants.
Mohammad Eslami said on Saturday that the new power plants will be able to generate 10,000 megawatts of electricity, noting that “it is not an easy task, but we have manpower and advanced industries for it”.
Russia commissioned Iran's first nuclear power plant, Bushehr, in 2011. It has one operational unit that generates 1,000 megawatts, providing less than two percent of the country’s electricity.
There are conflicting reports about how much the Bushehr plant coat, with former vice president Es’haq Jahangiri putting it at $8.5 billion and the Carnegie Endowment estimating it at $11 billion that took four decades to complete, making it one of the most expensive reactors in the world.
In January, AEOI spokesman said, “Negotiations are underway between Tehran and Moscow to construct the second and third units of the Bushehr power plant”.
South Korea made UAE’s Barakah nuclear power plant with $24 billion that can generate 5,380 MW and Poland is building a 9,000-MW plant with about €30 billion.
Financially crippled by US sanctions Iran has little capacity to finance such a project. In November, Iran said it needs $160 billion of investmentsin its oil and natural gas industries in the coming years, to avoid becoming a net importer.
Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri-Kani, who returned to Tehran Wednesday, is returning to Vienna Sunday evening to resume talks, local media reported.
Bagheri-Kani will leave for Vienna with a "clear working plan" to resolve the remaining issues and "significant challenges", Nour News which is affiliated with the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), Ali Shamkhani, said Sunday in an "exclusive report".
Nour News said the talks have reached an "agreement or dead-end borderline". "Continuation of the Western sides' unacceptable approach to resolving the remaining issues has unnecessarily dragged the talks and brought about unpredictable circumstances," it said.
Reports received by Iran International on Saturday spoke of a “an immediate deadline” imposed by Washington for receiving a clear answer from Tehran on a draft agreement.
Iran insists on the removal of more sanctions that the United States is willing to lift, verification of sanctions removal, and presentation of “absolutely necessary objective guarantees for the fulfilment of commitments,” Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in an address at the Munich Security Conference on February 19.
Some pundits say the Ukraine crisis may delay an agreement on the restoration of the JCPOA, particularly because there has yet been no concrete agreement on exactly which sanctions are to be lifted, the timeframe for the lifting of sanctions and verification, the guarantee that Iran insists on, and the fate of Iran's advanced IR-6 centrifuges.
Iran standing firm on its deamnds
Nour News added that an SNSC meeting last night, which was also attended by members of the negotiation team and Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, has decided that the acceptance of a deal would depend on a decision on these issues.
This means there is no real change in Iran’s position as Bagheri-Kani returns to Vienna. The Biden Administration must decide to continue talks or resort to another strategy as it has said before. So far, the administration seems willing to continue engagement, even with Russia as an active participants in the talks.
Amir-Abdollahian in a tweet Saturday said he had held a phone talk with the EU foreign policy chief Joseph Borrel and that Bagheri-Kani had also been in contact with Enrique Mora, European Union's lead negotiator on Iran's nuclear issue. "Our red lines are made clear to western parties. Ready to immediately conclude a good deal, should they show real will," he wrote.
Deputy Speaker of the Parliament, Abdolreza Mesri, on Sunday said the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee is going to hold an extraordinary session with Amir-Abdollahian Tuesday on the latest developments in Vienna. The parliament held a closed session Sunday morning during which, according to Tasnim News Agency, Ghalibaf offered a report on the current situation of the talks.
Last week over 250 of the 290 lawmakers of the Iranian parliament in a letter to President Ebrahim Raisi demanded that all sanctions, including those related to terrorism, missile development and human rights and those imposed by the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA), the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA), and CAATSA U-Turn, should be lifted.
Morteza Mahmoudvand, a member of the National Security and Foreign Policy Committee on Sunday said news from agreements made in Vienna were worrying and the government should be held to account if it failed to comply with the parliament's controversial legislation of December 2020.
The legislation which the administration of President Hassan Rouhani said unnecessarily escalated the nuclear standoff with the West obliged the government to start 20 percent uranium enrichment, in breach of the JCPOA) and to halt Iran's voluntary implementation of the Additional Protocol of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Meetings convened in Iran to come up with a response to Western proposals on a nuclear deal have ended without results, Iran International has learned.
Other information points to a deadline set by the United States, which the hardliner Iranian news website Mehr in Tehran has quickly denied.
Western diplomatic sources and sources in Iran have told Iran International TV correspondents that if remaining issues in the talks are not resolved in the next few days and an agreement not reached, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, JCPOA, will be deemed “dead.”
On the other hand, information obtained shows that meetings in Tehran after the return of chief nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri-Kani have ended inconclusively.
Sources in Iran’s foreign ministry have told Iran International that Washington had presented “an immediate” deadline to Iran for proposals for reviving the 2015 agreement submitted by “the West” – possibly meaning the US and the three western European signatories France, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
These foreign ministry sources said that in one meeting, the Supreme National Security Council Friday, in the presence of Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, did not reach consensus and took no decision over “a draft agreement presented in Vienna.” It was not clear which of the world powers in the Vienna talks, which include Russia and China, had endorsed the “draft agreement.”
The United States and its three European partners, the United Kingdom, France and Germany have not accepted Iran’s demand to provide guarantees regarding the permanent nature of the agreement and demands of economic nature Supreme Leader Khamenei has been insisting on.
One of the challenges in the talks has been Iran’s request for guarantees that the US would not again leave the JCPOA, and that Iran, as under JCPOA terms, would not be impeded in its economic relations internationally. The official news agency IRNA on Saturday once again highlighted this issue of guarantees.
The Biden Administration has said that constitutionally it cannot provide guarantees that the US would not leave the JCPOA. Neither the 2015 deal, nor the 2018 withdrawal, nor the many sanctions introduced by President Trump as executive orders after 2018, went to Congress for approval.
Iran International’s information indicates that Iran is insisting on the lifting of “all US sanctions” and “the closure of a pending case at the International Atomic Energy Agency” regarding alleged clandestine nuclear activities before 2003, when Iran reportedly imported machinery from the network of Pakistani scientist AQ Khan.
The US and its three European allies have been warning for months that time to reach an agreement in Vienna is limited and Iran must make a decision.
Tehran has been enriching uranium up to 60 percent since early 2021 and stockpiling fissile material. The West and other countries are concerned that this is taking the Islamic Republic closer to nuclear weapons or at least brings it to point of a nuclear threshold state.
A senior US State Department official on Friday told reporters that “significant progress” has been made in the past week or so, but “serious issues remain” unresolved.
It is not clear what impact the Russian invasion of Ukraine would have on the Vienna process, as Moscow has been playing an active role in the talks. The unprecedented crisis in the international order triggered by Russia’s actions could convince Iran to make a deal with the West or equally it could convince Tehran to insist on its demands, waiting to see how the unfolding events
Nuclear talks with Iran have made significant progress in the last week or so, but very tough issues remain, a senior US State Department official said Friday.
The US official, quoted by Reuters, said he hoped Iran's lead negotiator would return in the coming days to Vienna, where the talks are taking place, "with a positive view" but that even if he did, there were still difficult issues on the table.
"There's been significant progress over the last week or two," the US official told reporters on condition that he not be named. "But at the same time, it's important to note that very serious issues remain."
Iran’s official news website IRNA on Saturday drew attention to the “serious issues”in an unsigned article. While it said that no one is privy to the details of disagreements between Washington and Tehran, it is clear what Iran does NOT want.
IRNA elaborated that Tehran does not want a JCPOA+ type of a new agreement or any temporary deal.
A report by Reuters earlier this month said that a draft agreement is being shaped which points toward a step-by-step or sequenced approach starting with the release of some of Iran’s frozen funds in exchange for a five-percent cap on uranium enrichment by Iran. In the following weeks and months, the two sides take more steps to get closer to a final restoration of the JCPOA.
While the Western side in the Vienna talks did not deny the Reuters report, Iran rejected it as fakeWestern disinformation to influence the talks. IRNA’s reference to a “temporary deal” might be about a sequenced deal, which does not lift US sanctions in one step.
IRNA also said Iran does not want “implicit promises” and “verbal guarantees” in the negotiations, adding that mentioning what Tehran does not want, can shed light on the situation of the talks in Vienna.
This refers to Iran’s position since at least November insisting it wants an iron-clad guarantee by the United States that it would never renege on a new agreement, pointing to former president Donald Trump’s decision in 2018 to withdraw from the JCPOA. The Biden Administration in response has said that it cannot constitutionally provide such a guarantee. A future US president can make his own decisions if the agreement is not a treaty ratified by the Senate.
The US official talking with media on Friday said a deal, if one can be reached, would in many ways track the terms of the original accord on Iran's levels of uranium enrichment, the stockpile of enriched uranium it may hold, and the numbers of centrifuges it may operate.
However, he left open the possibility of some modifications to account the additional sanctions that president Trump imposed on Iran in 2018 and the nuclear advances that Iran has since made.
"We hope that when Iran comes back, it comes back in with a pre-disposition to try to resolve this quickly," the official said, saying there were still disagreements "for which there is not a solution that's on the table."
He also declined to name the sticking points, as did IRNA, and would not be drawn into whether Washington had persuaded Tehran to agree to follow-on negotiations on its nuclear program, its development of ballistic missiles or support for regional proxies.
He also said there has not been any deal reached in separate negotiations about the release of four U.S. citizens whom the United States believes have been wrongfully detained by Iran.
