Senior officials from the governments of Iran, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, China, the USA and the EU will all be in the same city. US and Iranian officials will not meet directly, but the US team plans to meet with officials from other countries that are signatories to the agreement, the senior government official said. It is unclear how long the meetings will last, the official said.
On Friday, the Joint Commission for the Comprehensive Joint Action Plan, the formal name of the nuclear deal, met virtually without the United States and confirmed that another meeting will take place next week in Vienna.
The commission will meet with relevant experts to “clearly identify the lifting of sanctions and nuclear implementation measures”.
The Biden government said the discussions in Vienna will focus on identifying actions that both the U.S. and Iran will need to take to re-enforce the Iran deal, including the lifting of sanctions by the U.S.
“The main issues that will be discussed are the nuclear measures that Iran would need to take to comply with the JCPOA terms and the sanctions relief measures that the United States would need to take in order to return to compliance as well,” said the spokesman. State Department, Ned Price, on Friday.
The government had previously said it would not lift sanctions just to get Iran on the negotiating table, but they did remove some obstacles from the Trump administration to diplomatic involvement.
In February, the U.S. informed the UN Security Council that it was reversing the unilateral efforts of the Trump administration to lift UN sanctions against Iran and lifted travel restrictions for Iranian diplomats to the United Nations by the Trump administration.
‘First days’
“We do not currently anticipate that there will be direct talks between the United States and Iran through this process, although the United States remains open to them,” added Price. “We are still in the early days and do not foresee an immediate advance, as there will be difficult discussions ahead. But we believe that this is a healthy step forward.”
The Vienna talks will start on Tuesday, Price said.
In 2018, then President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew the U.S. from the agreement, which aims to control the Iranian nuclear program. President Joe Biden said the United States will return to the nuclear deal as soon as Tehran fully resumes its deals.
This is the beginning of what must be a long process of negotiations to bring Iran and the United States back into compliance with the agreement.
This meeting takes place before Iran or the United States takes any tangible action to save or return to compliance with the agreement.
Friday’s news follows a meeting at the beginning of the day of the Joint Commission – in which the United States did not participate – to “discuss the prospect of a possible return of the United States to the JCPOA and how to ensure the full and effective implementation of the agreement by all parties, “said a European Union statement on Thursday.
On Thursday, Price called Friday’s Joint Commission meeting “a positive step.”
“We have made it clear for weeks that we are ready to seek a return to fulfilling our JCPOA commitments, consistently with Iran also doing the same,” Price said at a State Department press conference on Thursday. “We have also been frank about the fact that we talked to our partners in the P5 + 1 context and elsewhere about the best way to achieve this, including through a series of initial mutual steps.”
“We have been looking for options to do this, including indirect conversations through our European partners,” he said.
Iran has increasingly violated its commitments under the 2015 nuclear deal, since the U.S. abandoned the pact in May 2018 and the Trump administration continued its “maximum pressure” sanctions campaign against Tehran.
On Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif said in a tweet that a direct meeting between the United States and Iran was “unnecessary”.
“At the JCPOA JC virtual meeting, Iran and the EU / E3 + 2 agreed to resume face-to-face conversations in Vienna next Tuesday,” he said. “Objective: to quickly complete the lifting of nuclear sanctions and measures for the choreographed removal of all sanctions, followed by Iran to cease corrective measures.”
CNN’s Nic Robertson contributed to this report.