As violator of JCPOA, US must remove obstacles impeding its revival: Iran president

Iranian President Ebrahim Raeisi has once again emphasized that it was the United States, and not Iran, which left the 2015 nuclear agreement, saying obstacles that are impeding the revival of the deal should be removed by those who have created them.

Raeisi made the remarks in a Wednesday meeting with members of a number of American foreign policy think thanks on the third day of his trip to New York to attend the 77th session of the UN General Assembly.

"The Islamic Republic of Iran has not withdrawn from the existing agreement and has fulfilled all its commitments in this agreement," he said, referring to the nuclear accord, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

"It was the United States that pulled out of this agreement and it was the European countries that did not fulfill their obligations," he added.

Raeisi noted that the US has pulled out of the JCPOA and now Iran is rightly seeking to obtain a reliable guarantee that this experience would not happen again.

Since the beginning of the talks to salvage the JCPOA, he said, Iran has declared that it is in favor of negotiations "with the aim of reaching a fair and reasonable agreement, and not negotiations for the sake of negotiations."

The president further slammed the use of the safeguard issues as a pressure lever against Iran, saying the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has so far verified 15 times that the country's nuclear activities are peaceful and do not violate the agency's regulations

"Are these reports invalid for Western countries?" he asked.

The United States, under former President Donald Trump, abandoned the multilateral nuclear deal in May 2018 and reinstated unilateral sanctions that the agreement had lifted.

The talks to salvage the agreement kicked off in the Austrian capital of Vienna in April last year, months after Joe Biden succeeded Trump, with the intention of examining Washington’s seriousness in rejoining the deal and removing anti-Iran sanctions.

Despite notable progress, the US’s indecisiveness and procrastination caused multiple interruptions in the marathon talks.

Earlier on Wednesday, Raeisi said the “illegal and oppressive” sanctions imposed by the United States on Iran have failed to impede the Islamic Republic’s progress, and that the country has succeeded in making great achievements in various scientific, technological and economic fields despite the restrictions.

Oppressive, illegal US sanctions fail to impede Iran’s progress: President Raeisi

Iran

Sanctions are a new form of the same policy of military action “with the purpose of imposing the demands of hegemonic and tyrannical countries on independent countries, but they have failed to stop Iran,” the president said.

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