Iran hands in plan to remove sanctions and revive nuclear deal

Iranian negotiators have presented their draft proposals on sanctions removal and nuclear commitments.

The texts, submitted to European diplomats on Wednesday night, will help to determine whether there is the basis for a deal to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement.

The drafts are “a demonstration of our seriousness”, said Ali Bagheri Kani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator.

The announcement came on the fourth day of talks aimed at bringing Iran and the US back into the deal. The negotiations in Vienna are the first since the election in June of Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi.

“We have delivered two proposed drafts to them. They need to check the texts that we have provided to them. If they are ready to continue the talks, we are in Vienna to continue the talks,” Mr Kani said.

Iran’s top diplomat on Thursday said that an agreement to revive the deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, was “within reach” but it would depend on the goodwill of the West.

Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian said the negotiations were “proceeding with seriousness” and that the removal of sanctions was a “fundamental priority”.

“We seek rational, sober and result-oriented dialogue,” he said.

Under the pact, Tehran limited its uranium enrichment programme, a potential pathway to nuclear weapons, in exchange for relief from US, EU and UN economic sanctions.

But in 2018, then-US president Donald Trump abandoned the deal, saying it was too soft on Iran, and reimposed harsh US sanctions, spurring Tehran to breach nuclear limits in the pact.

While Mr Kani had said everything negotiated during six rounds of talks between April and June was open for discussion, a member of Iran’s delegation said “elements in the previous unapproved draft that were in conflict with the nuclear deal were revised and gaps were filled” in Iran’s submitted drafts.

A senior European diplomat estimated on Tuesday that 70 to 80 per cent of a draft deal on salvaging the 2015 accord was completed when Iran and world powers last met in June, though it remained unclear whether Tehran would resume talks where they left off.

Israel, which opposed the original 2015 pact as too limited in scope and duration, urged world powers on Thursday to halt the talks immediately.

It said that a UN nuclear watchdog report showed that Tehran had begun refining uranium with more advanced centrifuges at its Fordow plant dug into a mountain, where any enrichment had been banned under the deal.

The International Atomic Energy Agency report on Wednesday said Iran had begun the process of enriching uranium to 20 per cent purity with advanced centrifuges at the site.

European diplomats have said addressing Iran’s use of the advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium is still a crucial sticking point in the negotiations.

Under the 2015 deal, Iran limited uranium enrichment – a process that can yield fissile material for nuclear bombs – in return for relief from US, EU and UN sanctions. Iran insists the aims of its nuclear programme are peaceful.

“The advanced centrifuges present a conundrum because they constitute both an irreversible gain in knowledge and because if not destroyed, they can be quickly reassembled in the future, making it hard to meet the one-year breakout criterion [of preventing Iran from being able to produce a weapon’s worth of highly enriched uranium],” said Mark Fitzpatrick, of the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

“But under the JCPOA, centrifuges that were removed from operation only had to be put in storage, so Iran has a point in arguing that the demand for destruction is not in keeping with the 2015 deal.”

Iran’s use of advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium is a sticking point in the negotiations, say European diplomats