TEHRAN (Iran News) –Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian warned international powers that a window for reviving a 2015 international deal on Iran’s nuclear program, known as the JCPOA, remains open but not forever.
In a post on Twitter late on Friday, Amirabdollahian said that his meeting with European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell in Jordan earlier this week had focused on taking the final steps required to revive the JCPOA.
But he said that the window for reaching such an agreement would not remain open forever.
The top diplomat also said that he had highlighted the need for a political solution to the conflict in Ukraine in his meeting with Borrell.
He added in his tweet that the United States is not entitled to lecture other countries about human rights given crimes it has committed in Cuba’s Guantanamo detention camp and in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and considering the crimes committed by US forces against women and children in Afghanistan and Yemen in recent years.
On December 20, Amirabdollahian flew to Amman at the head of a delegation to take part in the second edition of the Baghdad Conference.
The Iranian foreign minister held talks with officials from governments and international organizations on the sidelines of the conference, including with EU foreign policy chief.
Meanwhile the U.S. Special Envoy for Iran Robert Malley says that the nuclear deal with Iran is not dead.
In an interview with RFE/RL’s Radio Farda on Friday, the Biden administration’s special envoy for Iran claimed that negotiations on reviving the deal reached a point in September where “we even thought for a day or two that Iran was on board” until Tehran tacked on new demands at the last minute that scuppered the chances of moving forward.
Robert Malley’s claim came as a few days ago American media broadcast a video of US President Joe Biden on the sidelines of a Nov. 4 election rally that he said the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is “dead,” but stressed the U.S. won’t formally announce it.
The remarks come as negotiations, which started in April last year in Vienna, remain stalled since August as Washington refuses to remove sanctions that were slapped on the Islamic Republic by the previous U.S. administration of Donald Trump.
Despite notable progress, the U.S. indecisiveness and procrastination caused multiple interruptions in the marathon talks.
Iranian officials have, time and again, asserted that upon potentially lifting the sanctions, Washington should be able to guarantee that it would not return the bans again.
