BEIJING (Dispatches) -- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said Friday the U.S. should first remove all its sanctions on Iran before returning to the 2015 nuclear deal.
“To return to the deal, lifting sanctions on Iran first is the natural thing to do,” Wang said in an address to the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
He stressed the need to resolve non-proliferation issues through negotiations and lambasted the unilateral bullying acts of the U.S. which he said are the “root cause” of issues pertaining to the Iranian nuclear issue.
“As the negotiations for the United States and Iran to resume compliance with the agreement are now in the final sprint, parties concerned need to make a political decision as quickly as possible and redouble diplomatic efforts to bring the JCPOA back on track,” Wang said.
The JCPOA has been endorsed by the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 and is “an important outcome of multilateral diplomacy and a key pillar of the international nuclear non-proliferation regime and peace and stability in the Middle East,” he added.
Since April, representatives from Iran and the P4+1 group of countries have been holding talks in Vienna aimed at revitalizing the JCPOA and bringing the U.S. back to compliance.
The U.S. has sent a delegation to Vienna but it is not attending the JCPOA Joint Commission talks directly as Washington is no longer a party to the deal.
The U.S., under former president Donald Trump, left the JCPOA in 2018 and returned the sanctions that had been lifted against Tehran as part of the agreement.
President Joe Biden has said Washington is willing to return to the pact if Tehran first suspends its countermeasures taken in response to U.S. violations and reimpostion of sanctions.
Iran says the onus is on the U.S. to revive the deal as it was Washington, not Tehran, that left the internationally recognized accord.
At the end of the fifth round of Vienna talks earlier this month, Iran Iran’s top nuclear negotiator said certain important issues still remained to be hammered out by Tehran and its partners in the JCPOA before they could reach an agreement on a potential revival of the accord.
He said it was up to the U.S. and the other co-signatories to make the “difficult decisions” for that to happen.
“All in all, we made good progress, but there are issues left, without which an agreement couldn’t be reached, and which have yet to be decided,” Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi added.
Elsewhere in his speech, the Chinese foreign minister voiced his country’s objection to establish a multilateral dialogue platform for regional security in the Persian Gulf region and build step by step a framework for collective, comprehensive, cooperative and sustainable security in the Middle East.
“China supports building a Middle East zone free of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction and stands ready to work toward that end,” Wang pointed out.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell told a UN Security Council meeting on Thursday that non-stop efforts to revive the JCPOA continue unabated in all its aspects, including nuclear activities and the lifting of sanctions.
“We are making progress but the negotiations are intense on a number of issues including on the precise sequencing of steps,” Borrell said.
Russian ambassador to international organizations in Vienna Mikhail Ulyanov said on Friday that the next meeting of the JCPOA Joint Commission would start this weekend.
“It will mark the beginning of the sixth round of the #ViennaTalks on restoration of the nuclear deal. Will it be the final round? Nobody knows but all negotiators hope so,” Ulyanov said in a post on his Twitter account.
Ulyanov told RIA Novosti that there are several more issues that are of fundamental importance for both Washington and Tehran, adding that it is still difficult to predict the development of the situation.
“The assessments of the prospects sound different; the restrained statements of both the Iranian side and the American side draw attention to themselves. This is due to the fact that there are still a number of issues that are of fundamental importance for these two negotiators,” he said.
He noted that it is a “thankless job” to predict how events will develop but emphasized that the sides have an attitude to achieve a successful conclusion of the negotiations. “And how long it will take – we’ll see,” he said.