EU nuclear talks coordinator to visit Iran

EU deputy foreign affairs secretary Enrique Mora is scheduled to fly to Tehran tomorrow for talks on a range of regional issues, including a restart of the stalled talks between Iran and the US to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.

Mora had been coordinating the meetings of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) joint commission taking place alongside the indirect US-Iran talks in Vienna, before they were shelved shortly after the election of Ebrahim Raisi as the president of Iran on 18 June.

"Following the recent regional and international consultations, tomorrow I will host Mr Enrique Mora," Iran's recently-appointed deputy foreign minister Ali Baqeri-Kani said today. "Discussions on regional and bi-lateral issues, including Afghanistan and the talks about the lifting of the oppressive sanctions, will be on the agenda," he said.

The visit comes as negotiators from Iran's partners in the 2015 deal — the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China and the US — wait for the new administration in Tehran to return to the talks aimed at bringing both Iran and the US back into compliance with their JCPOA commitments.

That would, in turn, lift the economic sanctions that were re-imposed on Tehran following former US president Donald Trump's decision to unilaterally exit the agreement in mid-2018.

The Raisi administration has been saying for months that it will return to the talks "soon" once it has settled in and completed its internal review of the previous rounds of negotiations.

Iran's foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian said in a meeting with the President of the Swiss National Council Andreas Aebi yesterday that the internal review will be concluded "in the near future" and that Iran's actions with regard to the JCPOA would be "commensurate" with those of its partners.

Tehran has been seeking guarantees that a future US president would not walk away from the resurrected agreement in the same way that Trump did — a request US negotiators have said is not realistic.

Amir-Abdollahian last week said Tehran will also be looking for ways to verify the implementation of its partners commitments under the deal, particularly the lifting of US sanctions which at one point took close to 2mn b/d of Iran's crude oil and condensate off the market.

Iran's crude oil production stood at 2.47mn b/d in September, according to Argus estimates, which is up from 1.97mn b/d in the final quarter of last year, but still well down on the 3.81mn b/d it was producing on average in the first quarter of 2018, before the US reneged on the JCPOA.

By Nader Itayim