The secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council said on Monday that the Islamic Republic had cancelled its inspection agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog.
Speaking to reporters at a press conference in Iraq, Ali Larijani said that his country had followed through on the Iranian foreign minister’s threat to break off cooperation with the IAEA if nuclear snapback sanctions were reimposed.
“Our foreign minister announced after the Cairo meeting that if the trigger mechanism is activated, the negotiations will be considered null and void,” Larijani said, per the Islamic Republic News Agency. “If the agency has a request in this regard, it should submit it to the secretariat of the supreme national security council so that it can be reviewed.”
In September, Iran and the IAEA agreed at a meeting in Cairo to resume nuclear inspections in Iran, including at sites that the United States and Israel bombed during the 12-day war in June.
Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said that agreement would be cancelled if France, Germany and the United Kingdom completed snapback sanctions against Iran at the U.N. Security Council under resolution 2231, which formalized the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal.
The three countries initiated snapback in August citing Iran’s failure to comply with the terms of the deal and U.N. nuclear sanctions on Iran were reimposed in late September.
“We believe that applying the trigger mechanism was a wrongdoing on the part of Europe that has no basis, and in fact, the Europeans abused the snapback, while the Iranians had met all the conditions for the past 10 years, but today China and Russia do not accept the return of sanctions against Iran,” Larijani said.
“Resolution 2231 is over, and what China and Russia are doing is based on the text of the agreement,” he said.
