Johnson warned against ‘emboldening’ Iran with weak new nuclear deal

Any lifting of sanctions risks funds flowing back to Tehran-backed terrorist groups, ex-minister says

BORIS JOHNSON has been warned against signing a “weak” new deal with Iran that would involve sanctions being lifted from the country’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

A British diplomat at talks in Vienna said that negotiators were “close” to an agreement that would limit Iran’s nuclear programme. But senior figures in the UK and US fear that it will be weaker than its predecessor, the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), from which Donald Trump withdrew the US in 2018, describing it as a “horrible, one-sided deal”. Robert Jenrick, the former Cabinet minister, said the rumoured deal risked “emboldening” Tehran.

Leaks from the negotiations have suggested that Western countries may be on the brink of agreeing to Iranian demands to lift sanctions against the IRGC, which is designated as a terrorist group in the US. The Commons foreign affairs committee has called for the IRGC, a branch of the Iranian armed forces, to be similarly proscribed in the UK, with MPs saying in a report that they were satisfied that the actions of the group “meet the criteria for proscription in the Terrorism Act 2000”.

Mr Jenrick said: “At a time when the West is finally coming together to tackle one authoritarian regime, we must be very careful about emboldening another.

“With no restrictions on how Iran can spend the cash windfall generated by a new deal, there is a serious danger that it will be diverted from the impoverished and repressed Iranian people and placed back into the hands of the IRGC and Iran’s web of terrorist proxy groups.

“The Government should not sign an agreement that removes known terrorists and terror-enabling groups like the

Iranian Revolutionary Guard from sanctions and critical anti-terror blacklists. That make us all less safe.”

A source familiar with the talks said: “The current deal is much, much weaker than the one that was negotiated in 2015. It is clearly a very weak agreement and one that could endanger the stability of the region.

“There are other issues that the Iranians are requesting are added, including de-listing the IRGC as a terrorist organisation and de-listing other entities. That is still being negotiated.

“If they were to be de-listed, they will gain complete legitimacy for what they are doing and get the funds for that.”

Under the JCPOA, Iran agreed to curb its nuclear programme to make it harder to obtain fissile material for a nuclear weapon, in return for the lifting of sanctions by countries such as the UK. Britain, France, Germany and the US have been holding talks with Iran in Vienna to revive the pact.

On Friday Stephanie Al-Qaq, the Foreign Office’s Middle East director, who was in Vienna, tweeted: “We are close. E3 [France, Germany and the UK] negotiators leaving Vienna briefly to update ministers on state of play. Ready to return soon.” She said the talks were at their “endgame”.

When the IRGC was designated as a terrorist organisation by the US in 2019,

Mr Trump’s administration described it as an “active and enthusiastic participant in acts of terror,” including the 1983 bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut and the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia.

Another sticking point in the talks has been Tehran’s insistence that the International Atomic Energy Agency should draw a line under concerns about traces of processed uranium found at sites in Iran that suggested the presence of undeclared nuclear material. It had been demanding to know the origins of the traces.

Yesterday, the deal came under lastminute pressure from Russia, which demanded written guarantees that Ukraine-related sanctions would not prevent it from trading broadly with Tehran under a revived pact.

In an intervention that could derail the process, Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, insisted on sweeping guarantees which could introduce major loopholes in the tight financial, economic and energy sanctions the West has imposed in recent days because of the invasion of Ukraine, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Mr Lavrov said: “We need a guarantee that these sanctions will not in any way touch the regime of trade-economic and investment relations which is laid down in the nuclear deal.”