Iran not to abandon negotiation over nuke pact: president

TEHRAN: Iran will not leave the negotiating table, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said on Thursday, after the announcement that the Vienna nuclear talks will resume on Nov 29.

“As Iran has previously stated, we will not leave the negotiating table, but we will stand up to excessive demands that cause damages on the interests of the Iranian nation,” said Raisi.

The president made the remark on the occasion of Iran’s National Day of Fighting Against Global Arrogance, celebrating the anniversary of the seizure of the US embassy in the country after the 1979 revolution, semi-official Iranian Students’ News Agency (ISNA) reported.

Iran expects the upcoming Vienna talks, aiming to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement, to be “result-oriented,” and Iranian negotiators will “by no means fall short of the rightful demand of the Iranian people, namely the lifting of the iniquitous sanctions,” Raisi said.

While pursuing the lifting of the sanctions, he added, Tehran will simultaneously seek to neutralise their effects on the Iranian economy.Raisi said the United States has been hostile to Iran for seven decades, in a reference to the US-backed coup that overthrew the Iranian government in 1953 during the nationalisation of the country’s oil resources.

On Wednesday evening, an agreement to resume the Vienna talks on November 29 was announced by Iranian deputy foreign minister and nuclear negotiator Ali Bagheri Kani, and later confirmed by the EU and US official diplomatic sources.