Irrelevant matters not to help save JCPOA: FM spox

TEHRAN (defapress) – Iran has rejected the push by the United States and France for a new round of talks with Tehran, saying that subjects irrelevant to the 2015 nuclear deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) would not help save the pact.

News ID: 77663

Date: 07 June 2019 - 12:01

In his Friday statement, Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyyed Abbas Mousavi rebuffed the anti-Iranian remarks by US President Donald Trump and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Iran’s nuclear and other defensive programs, saying that Trump’s hackneyed claims "do not merit a reaction".

During their meeting in Caen on Thursday, Trump and Macron called for efforts to keep Tehran from what they called getting nuclear weapons.

Macron said France and the US shared the same objective on Iran, claiming that they sought to prevent the Islamic Republic from getting a nuclear weapon, reduce Iran's ballistic activity, and contain the country's regional activity.

Reacting to Macron’s comments, Mousavi said, “raising issues irrelevant to the JCPOA will not be of any help to preserving the accord, and it will undermine the trust between the remaining parties to the deal.”

This comes while Washington has withdrawn from the nuclear deal with Iran, and France is one of the European trio with UK and Germany that have remained in the 2015 deal and have been working to reduce US pressures on Iran by designing a financial mechanism to help the country with its international trade and banking transactions in spite of US sanctions.

“Despite a series of speeches and political statements, the European parties to the pact have so far failed to honor their commitments under the JCPOA and the commitments they gave after the US illegal withdrawal from the nuclear deal,” Mousavi said, adding that “they have been unable to prepare the ground for our country to get the full benefits of this multilateral agreement.”

Elsewhere in his remarks, the Iranian spokesman said that Trump’s “repeated, groundless and paradoxical” comments in the meeting with Macron were so worthless that they did not merit a new response.

Message end/