Will legal and ethical setback to ‘snapback’ set E3 back?
By Mehdi Ebrahim
Staff writer
As the febrile atmosphere of discord-shrouded stalled talks between Iran and the European signatories to the 2015 nuclear deal, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), notches record high with the explicit caveats of Germany, France and the United Kingdom to invoke the snapback mechanism by the end of August, the questions pops up as to what extent the E3 maintains legitimacy to leverage the anti-Tehran provision enshrined in Article 11 of UN Security Council Resolution 2231, which endorsed the JCPOA.
Referenced in technical parlance as the Dispute Settlement Mechanism, the snapback procedure allows the reimposition of hefty UN sanctions on Iran on the pretext of the Islamic Republic’s “significant non-compliance” with the landmark deal.
It stands out a mile that the European troika faces legal and moral hurdles in attempting to trigger the snapback against Iran, and the implications of doing so without clear justification would be colossal.
The cornerstone of the legal challenge lies in the fact that Washington, under the first term of US President Donald Trump’s administration, unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA in 2018 and subsequently asserted its right to trigger snapback, but the decision was widely maligned by the international community, including the E3, who argued that the US, having pulled out, not by a long chalk had the legal standing to invoke the clause.
The E3’s legal basis for invoking snapback is similarly tenuous as Iran’s gradual scaling back of its commitments since 2019, which is labelled as “non-compliance” with the JCPOA, was largely a response to the US withdrawal and the subsequent reimposition of crippling sanctions.
Tehran also at that time consistently maintained that its nuclear-related actions are reversible if the other parties fully uphold their obligations by the lifting of sanctions and providing economic relief.
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