NEW YORK (Dispatches) -- Britain should repay its four decade-old £400 million debt to Iran and take serious steps to remove sanctions, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hussein Amir-Abdollahian has told the British foreign secretary, Liz Truss, in the first meeting between the two countries at foreign secretary level since 2018.
The two met on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly’s 76th Session here Wednesday, with Truss acknowledging that Britain owed the sum but claimed sanctions made it impossible to pay.
Amir-Abdollahian says European countries are only facilitating the United States’ violations against Iran with their silence and inaction on Washington’s measures targeting the Islamic Republic.
Amir-Abdollahian made the remarks to Britain’s new Foreign Secretary Liz Truss on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly’s 76th Session in New York on Wednesday.
He also said the European attitude was helping the U.S. administration keep enforcing its illegal sanctions against Iran, while at the same time claiming to be interested in returning to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal.
Amir-Abdollahian said while the West has repeatedly promised to undo its past wrongs with regard to the implementation of the deal, no practical action has been taken yet.
“Unfortunately, the UK has been part of this inaction too, and this approach should change,” IRNA quoted Amir-Abdollahian as telling Truss.
On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman reacted to “harsh tweets” by the British foreign secretary Liz Truss regarding to the legal case of Nazanin Zaghari who serves a prison sentence for a number of security offenses.
Truss wrote in a tweet after her meeting with Amir-Abdollahian that the UK was “working tirelessly to secure” Zaghari’s release and her return to her family.
“I pressed Iran yesterday on this and will continue to until she returns home,” she claimed.
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh hit back, saying, “Harsh tweets—contrary to IRL tone—may fetch headlines.”
“But slogans can never replace lawful verdicts issued by courts,” he added.
In an earlier tweet on Wednesday, the British foreign secretary claimed that she had pressed two issues during her meeting with Iran’s foreign minister in New York.
“I’m absolutely determined to secure the release of detained British nationals,” she wrote. “And I want to bring Iran back to the table on the nuclear deal and return to Vienna talks.”
Zaghari is an Iranian national who lived in Britain at the time of her arrest. Iran does not recognize dual nationality, and considers dual citizens as Iranian citizens only.
Referring to the meeting, Khatibzadeh said as Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian had made it clear the UK “must adopt long overdue change in its approach.”
Back in April, Iran and the remaining parties to the 2015 nuclear agreement began talks in Vienna to revive the historic agreement, officially referred to as the JCPOA, by bringing the U.S. back into full compliance with the deal.
The Vienna talks hit a pause in June after Iran’s presidential election, but the new administration of President Ebrahim Raisi has voiced readiness to resume the talks after taking full stock of the previous rounds of negotiations.
U.S. Threats
A senior official at the Joe Biden administration said on Thursday that Washington’s patience was wearing thin and that further delays could lead the U.S. and its partners to conclude a return to the JCPOA was no longer worthwhile.
While Iran has said it is ready to rejoin the talks, it has not yet offered a date for a resumption, named a negotiating team or indicated that it is willing to pick up where the negotiations left off in June, according to the US official, who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity.
Iranian officials have said as the party which abandoned the nuclear accord and imposed sanctions on Tehran, the U.S. should take the first step to undo its past wrongs, but Washington has been trying to throw the ball at Iran’s court and maintain the core elements of its most draconian sanctions.
According to the Associated Press, the official said if the talks don’t resume, the U.S. will at some point determine that Iran is no longer interested in the benefits that the JCPOA offers or that its recent technological advances could not be undone by the limits the deal imposed.
“We’re still interested. We still want to come back to the table,” the senior U.S. State Department official said. “The window of opportunity is open. It won’t be open forever if Iran takes a different course.”
In his Tuesday address to the UN General Assembly, President Raisi said Washington is using sanctions as a “new way of war” against other nations.
“Sanctions against the Iranian nation started not with my country’s nuclear program; they even predate the Islamic Revolution and go back to the year 1951 when oil nationalization went underway in Iran,” he said.