Alwaght- Iran urged on Tuesday the US to abandon its excessive demands in nuclear talks and instead offer ironclad guarantees that it won’t withdraw from the deal once again.
“We (Iran) have never left the negotiating table and we will not do so in the future as well. The opposite side must abandon its excessive demands, and the guarantees given during the negotiations must be reassuring,” Ali Bahadori Jahromi Iranian administration’s spokesman told reporters in the capital Tehran.
He went on to point to Tehran’s opinion on the US response to an EU draft text for the revival of the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), stating that negotiations are underway.
“We have been following up on the four [main] issues of guarantees, practical verifications, removal of sanctions in a durable manner, and the International Atomic Energy Agency’s (IAEA) political claims regarding the Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement (CSA) from the onset of the talks,” Bahadori Jahromi stated.
Spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry Nasser Kan’ani said early on Friday that the Islamic Republic had offered its opinion on the US’s response to an EU draft text for the JCPOA revival.
“After receiving the United States’ response, the Islamic Republic’s expert team examined it carefully and Iran’s responses were compiled and submitted to the coordinator tonight,” Kan’ani said.
“The text that was sent (by Iran) has a constructive approach aimed at finalizing the negotiations,” he added.
The diplomat added that Iran’s response was created “following evaluation on various levels.”
Four days of intense talks between representatives of Iran and the five remaining parties to the JCPOA ended on August 8 with a modified text proposed by the EU on the table.
The talks came after a five-month hiatus as the US negotiators failed to overcome their indecisiveness.
Iran submitted its response to the EU draft proposal on August 15, a week after the latest round of talks wrapped up. After submitting its response, Tehran urged Washington to show “realism and flexibility” in order to reach an agreement.
However, it took almost ten days for the Joe Biden administration to submit its response to Iran's comments on the EU draft.
The United States, under former president Donald Trump, abandoned the deal in May 2018 and reinstated crippling sanctions that the agreement had lifted.
The talks to salvage the agreement kicked off in the Austrian capital in April last year, months after Biden succeeded Trump, to examine the potential of the US return to the deal and its removal of sanctions.
Despite notable progress, the US indecisiveness and procrastination caused multiple interruptions in the marathon talks.
