JCPOA Survival Hinges on All Parties’ Commitment: Rouhani

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said if the rights of the Iranian nation under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) are not met, there is no reason for Tehran to stay in the deal.

News ID: 71079

Date: 05 July 2018 - 11:53

TEHRAN (Defapress) –“Iran’s nuclear activities have always been peaceful,” Rouhani said during a Wednesday meeting in Vienna with Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Yukiya Amano.

“The JCPOA was a great success for diplomacy and the IAEA and continuation of this success depends only on balance of all parties’ commitment,” he added.

Referring to US’s withdrawal from the deal, the president said, “In such a situation, the other signatories have the responsibility to counter this move and compensate for the imbalance of the commitments”.

“It is not logical that in a treaty, a party lives up to all its commitments while the other parties violate theirs. If our nation’s rights are not met, we will make a new decision,” Rouhani stressed.

Amano, for his part, said, “The JCPOA was a great technical and diplomatic achievement and the agency has repeatedly verified that Iran has completely lived up to its commitments under the deal”.

He also appreciated Iran’s restraint after US’s withdrawal from the JCPOA.

Rouhani arrived in Vienna on Tuesday on the second leg of his tour of Europe, which had already taken him to Switzerland.

The Iranian president has enhanced political contacts with foreign leaders on the ways to save the JCPOA after the US exit.

On May 8, the US president pulled his country out of the JCPOA, which was achieved in Vienna in 2015 after years of negotiations among Iran and the Group 5+1 (Russia, China, the US, Britain, France and Germany).

Following the US exit, Iran and the remaining parties launched talks to save the accord.

Meanwhile, Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei has underlined that any decision to keep the JCPOA running without the US should be conditional on “practical guarantees” from the Europeans.

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