France’s President Macron says Iran must remain committed to the deal
NEWS DESK
PARIS
Iran wants to bring its nuclear deal with world powers “back on track” after the US unilateral withdrawal, the spokesman of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran said on Thursday, a day after Tehran said it was scaling back curbs to its nuclear program.
“Our goal is to strengthen the JCPOA (the acronym for the nuclear agreement) and bring it back on track,” Behrouz Kamalvandi was quoted as saying by IRNA.
His comments came a day after concerns were raised that Iran was about to default on at least parts of the nuclear deal.
French President Emmanuel Macron later said the Iran nuclear deal must be saved and that the accord’s signatories should do all they can to ensure that the Islamic Republic respects it.
Macron told reporters on Thursday that “Iran must remain in this agreement and we must do everything we can to ensure that it stays in.”
Speaking ahead of an EU summit in Romania, Macron lauded the 2015 deal curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions as “a good agreement.”
But he said it should be completed with other pacts governing Iran’s missile development and its potentially destabilizing role in the Middle East.
Amid heated rhetoric from Tehran and Washington in recent days, Macron urged the signatories not to “get caught up in any escalation” and to “jointly watch over our collective security.” Meanwhile the European Union on Thursday urged Iran to respect the international agreement curbing the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions, saying it aims to continue trading with the country despite US sanctions. The EU and major European powers — Britain, France and Germany — also said that they “note with great concern the statement made by Iran concerning its commitments” to the nuclear deal. The joint statement came as the bloc struggles to preserve the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, a day after a new deadline from Tehran on finding a solution to make up for last year’s unilateral US withdrawal from the accord and re-imposed US sanctions on Iran.
