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ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - Iran’s deputy foreign minister and top nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri arrived in London on Thursday to hold talks with British officials about a possible revival of the 2015 nuclear deal, as elsewhere in London a people’s tribunal heard harrowing testimonies about the killing of hundreds of protesters in November 2019, and the husband of jailed British-Iranian national Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe entered his nineteenth day of hunger strike.
“These days, Dr Bagheri is holding successful talks in Europe”, Iran foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian tweeted on Wednesday. “At the negotiating table in Vienna, we are ready to deliver a good agreement. The return of all parties to their commitments is an important and leading principle.”
Yet Bagheri asserted on Wednesday that he will not talk to his counterparts in Vienna later this month about the nuclear issue because the agreement was already negotiated, and he would rather discuss the implications of the United States’ withdrawal from the deal in 2018. His statement was in reaction to a question from state TV about the French Foreign Minister’s statement that the upcoming nuclear talks would resume from the point where they stalled in June.
“These days, Dr Bagheri is holding successful talks in Europe”, Iran foreign minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian tweeted on Wednesday. “At the negotiating table in Vienna, we are ready to deliver a good agreement. The return of all parties to their commitments is an important and leading principle.”
Yet Bagheri asserted on Wednesday that he will not talk to his counterparts in Vienna later this month about the nuclear issue because the agreement was already negotiated, and he would rather discuss the implications of the United States’ withdrawal from the deal in 2018. His statement was in reaction to a question from state TV about the French Foreign Minister’s statement that the upcoming nuclear talks would resume from the point where they stalled in June.
Iran's top JCPOA negotiator is asserting that when talks in resume in Vienna later this month, discussions will be only on sanctions and not at all about nuclear issues. This is at best unconstructive, and at worst makes it a waste of time. [Thread] 🧵https://t.co/9oy6pypDtU
— Ali Vaez (@AliVaez) November 10, 2021
“We do not have nuclear talks, because the nuclear issue was fully agreed in 2015 in the form of an agreement reached between Iran and the P5+1,” Bagheri told Iran state TV on Wednesday. “The main issue we are facing now is the consequences of the US withdrawal from the JCPOA, which are limited to the illegal sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic of Iran.”
Iran maintains that the US should lift all sanctions imposed on the country before and after the withdrawal of Washington under President Donald Trump in 2018. However the US has accused Iran of destablising activities in the region and maintains that it is in favour of a comprehensive agreement that addresses all the outstanding issues, including the nuclear and missile program, as well as Tehran’s malign activities across the region.
The US government has accused Tehran of malign behavior including the imprisonment of dual nationals as bargaining chips in negotiations with the West. Indeed, if Iran’s top nuclear envoy were to hold talks with his British counterparts in the foreign office on Thursday, he would notice Richard Ratcliffe outside the building, where he has been on hunger strike since October 24, following the loss of his wife’s appeal to overturn her conviction in Iran on October 16.
Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has been incarcerated in Tehran since April 2016 on charges of spying which she - and the British government - firmly deny. Ratcliffe claims his wife has been imprisoned as leverage for a £400 million debt that the United Kingdom owes Iran.
Not far from Ratcliffe’s vigil on Whitehall, dozens of Iranians have gathered in a building for a tribunal to hold the Iranian government accountable for one of its darkest violations of human rights. The people’s tribunal known as Aban Tribunal, after the Iranian month of Aban during which between 300 to 1,500 protesters were gunned down by the Iranian security forces two years ago, has begun hearing from witnesses of the crackdown. On Wednesday the tribunal heard testimonies from some of the 45 witnesses, who spoke in vivid terms about the crimes committed against the anti-government protesters.
Horrifying account of how the detainees of #IranAtrocity Nov 2019 were tortured. Giving them psychotropic drugs,intense psychological torture... Shame on EU govs. to shake hands with #Raisi who ordered the torure&killing@AbanTribunal @JosepBorrellF @IranCfppi @BorisJohnson https://t.co/Bum7LXf45D
— Shiva Mahbobi (@shivamahbobi) November 10, 2021
Iranian human rights activists living outside the country say the West must take the country’s bleak human rights record into account when reaching an agreement with Tehran over its nuclear issue. This is highly unlikely as the current president Ebrahim Raisi is himself implicated in the execution of around 5,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988 as the Iran-Iraq war drew to an end, a war crime for which Sweden is currently trying an Iranian official.
Iran has held six rounds of negotiations during the previous government with its European counterparts, China and Russia, but the talks were suspended in June when the hardliner Raisi was elected president. The country is under excruciating economic pressure mostly because of the international sanctions imposed by the US, and Raisi’s government has maintained that the only way forward for reviving the 2015 nuclear deal, known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actions (JCPOA), is for the US to lift all sanctions and provide a guarantee that future administrations will not again rescind the agreement. The US has rejected this.
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