Zarif reacts to Elysee Palace position on Iran's return to JCPOA

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif reacted to a claim made by a French presidential official on Iran's return to the JCPOA prior to the return of the United States to the nuclear deal.

“Why on earth should Iran—a country that stood firm & defeated 4 years of a brutal US economic terrorism imposed in violation of JCPOA & UNSC Resolution—show goodwill gesture first?” Zarif wrote in a tweet on Tuesday.

“It was the US that broke the deal—for no reason. It must remedy its wrong; then Iran will respond,” the foreign minister added.

Zarif’s remarks came as the French official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Iran must first reverse its reciprocal measures vis-à-vis the 2015 nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), before the United States could rejoin the deal, Press TV reported.

“If they are serious about negotiations and want to obtain a new commitment from all participants in the JCPOA, first they must refrain from further provocations and second they must respect what they are no longer respecting,” said the French official.

JCPOA was inked in 2015 between Tehran and six major world states — the US, France, Britain, Germany, China and Russia — and was later endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231.

After abandoning the deal, Washington re-imposed the anti-Iran sanctions lifted by the accord and launched a push to fully destroy the agreement by trying to dissuade the remaining signatories from staying in the agreement and threatening sanctions against any party that refuses to cut business ties with Tehran in defiance of American sanctions.

Washington’s pressure blocked the European co-signatories from fulfilling their contractual obligations, a situation that prompted Tehran to retaliate and suspend parts of its own commitments under Article 36 of the deal.

A few days after US President Joe Biden took office earlier this month, Zarif urged the United States to make the "fundamental choice" to lift sanctions and reverse the "failed policies" of the previous administration, which took a hard line on Tehran.

He cautioned that any efforts from Washington to extract additional concessions would ultimately end in failure.

"Iran wants the nuclear deal it made," Zarif wrote in an op-ed recently published in the Foreign Affairs magazine.

The Iranian foreign minister, currently in Russia on the second leg of his regional tour to Caucasus region, said in a meeting with his Russian counterpart that whenever the US lifted the sanctions again and stopped punishing the world’s law-abiding countries that choose to engage in legal trade with Iran, as the UN resolution allows, Tehran would be ready to deliver a befitting response, too.

He stressed that Tehran takes Washington’s actions, not words, as its yardstick.

Source: Iran Daily