Parliament rules out resumption of US talks until preconditions met
Iran's Parliament said in a statement on Wednesday that the country should not resume nuclear negotiations with the United States until preconditions are met.
"When the US use negotiations as a tool to deceive Iran and cover up a sudden military attack by the Zionist regime (Israel), talks cannot be conducted as before. Preconditions must be set and no new negotiations can take place until they are fully met," the statement said.
The statement did not define the preconditions, but Iran’s Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has previously said there should be guarantees there will be no further attacks against Tehran.
Israel and the US launched strikes on Iran's nuclear facilities last month, claiming that they were part of a program geared towards developing nuclear weapons. Tehran maintains that its nuclear program is purely for civilian purposes.
Tehran and Washington had held five rounds of indirect negotiations mediated by Oman prior to the 12-day air war, with US demands that Tehran drop its domestic uranium enrichment program reaching a dead end.
Last week, Araghchi reiterated Tehran's position that it would not agree to a nuclear deal that prevents it from enriching uranium and would refuse to discuss extra-nuclear topics such as its ballistic missile program.
US President Donald Trump said on Tuesday he was in no rush to negotiate with Iran as its nuclear sites were now "obliterated", but the US, in coordination with three European countries, has agreed to set the end of August as the deadline for a deal.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on Tuesday that Paris, London and Berlin would trigger the United Nations sanctions snapback mechanism, which would reimpose international sanctions on Iran, by the end of August if there is no concrete progress regarding an agreement.
"The threat to use the snapback mechanism lacks legal and political basis and will be met with an appropriate and proportionate response from the Islamic Republic of Iran," Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei told a press conference on Monday.
"The European parties, who are constantly trying to use this possibility as a tool, have themselves committed gross and fundamental violations of their obligations under the JCPOA (2015 Iran nuclear deal)," Baqaei said.
"They have failed to fulfill the duties they had undertaken under the JCPOA, so they have no legal or moral standing to resort to this mechanism."
The US withdrew from the deal in 2018 (known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action) and the European parties to the deal failed to fulfil their commitments under the deal. In response, the Islamic Republic began to scale back its JCPOA commitments.