TEHRAN - Hossein Naghavi Hosseini, the spokesman for the Majlis National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, has said Iran will review its decision to reduce its nuclear commitments if other sides take practical actions to fulfill their obligations.

“Increasing purity of enriched uranium and using advanced centrifuges are Iran’s next steps on the issue of the JCPOA. However, Iran will review its decision to reduce nuclear commitments if other sides take practical actions in fulfilling their obligations,” he tweeted on Monday, according to ISNA.

Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif has said Iran will take the next step in reducing commitments under the JCPOA if the remaining parties to the agreement do not honor their obligations.

“It is the Islamic Republic of Iran who should take decision in this respect. This step will be taken in continuation of previous actions if other sides do not fulfil their obligations,” he told ICANA in an interview published on Saturday.

He noted that Iran’s actions are within the framework of the JCPOA, the official name for the nuclear agreement.

Paragraph 36 of the JCPOA has provided a mechanism to resolve disputes and allows one side, under certain circumstances, to stop complying with the deal if the other side is out of compliance.

Under the nuclear deal, Iran agreed to put limits on its nuclear activities in exchange for termination of economic and financial sanctions.

However, Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the UN-endorsed JCPOA in May 2018 and imposed the toughest ever sanctions against Iran in line with his administration’s “maximum pressure” policy against Tehran.

The remaining parties, particularly the European sides, have failed to honor their commitments since the U.S. reimposed the sanctions.

The remaining JCPOA parties held an emergency meeting in Vienna on July 28 to discuss Iran’s moves in reducing its nuclear commitments and explore ways to save the nuclear deal.

Abbas Araghchi, the deputy foreign minister and a top nuclear negotiator who represented Iran in the meeting, called the talks “constructive”. However, he warned Iran would continue to reduce its nuclear commitments if Europeans failed to salvage the pact. 

“The atmosphere was constructive. Discussions were good. I cannot say that we resolved everything, I can say there are lots of commitments,” the senior nuclear negotiator told Reuters.
 
Helga Schmid, secretary general of the European External Action Service (EEAS), also issued a statement saying that “participants reaffirmed their continued commitment to preserving the JCPOA.”

She also said, “They recalled that both nuclear commitments and sanctions-lifting are essential parts of the agreement.”

On May 8, exactly one year after the U.S. abandoned the multi-nation nuclear agreement and reimposed sanctions on Iran, Tehran said its “strategic patience” is over and announced a partial withdrawal from some aspects of the pact, saying that the country would no longer adhere to some of the limits on its nuclear activities. It also threatened to step up uranium enrichment if an agreement is not made within 60 days to protect it from the sanctions’ effects. 

In follow-up to that deadline, on July 7 Iran announced that it has started enriching uranium to a higher purity than the 3.67% as the Europeans missed the 60-day deadline to devise a concrete mechanism to protect the country from the U.S. sanctions.

NA/PA