Sanctions and arms embargo on Iran: the EU aligns itself with Russia and China against Washington’s demands
Last Saturday, the US State Department announced the start of the snapback mechanism, that is the return to the sanctions against the Iranian regime suspended after the approval of UN Resolution 2231 of 2015. With this decision, for the US administration, they return in force the provisions taken with the UN resolutions 1696, 1737, 1747, 1803, 1835 and 1929.
But for Russia, China and other governments, the EU in the lead, what Washington claims would not be correct. For Mr. Pesc Josep Borrell, in fact, since the United States has exited the agreement on the Iranian nuclear program of 2015 (JCPOA), it is in no way possible for them to decide to re-establish sanctions against Tehran.
Two opposite diplomatic theses collide here, only apparently difficult to understand, but in reality very simple to explain: for Washington, legally speaking, the Vienna nuclear agreement – known as Jcpoa – must be considered separately from UN resolution 2231. The second it has indeed given international recognition to the JCPOA, but it has a different legal value than the latter. Therefore, for the Americans, leaving the JCPOA does not mean leaving Resolution 2231. On the other hand, for the others, this thesis is not valid and abandoning the Vienna nuclear agreement means de facto and de jure no longer having the right to speak out. any topic concerning the nuclear deal with Tehran.
Obviously, needless to say, the Iranian regime today supports the second thesis and it is for this reason that Zarif should have arrived in Europe a few days ago, with the express purpose of strengthening the position of those who saw the same in the Jcpoa and in the UN resolution 2231. thing.
Yet, when Tehran signed the agreement, the Iranian diplomatic position was very different. In fact, in 2015 the Iranian diplomats were very clear: their commitment was only towards compliance with the Vienna agreement, the JCPOA, and not with the UN resolution 2231.
And this for a number of reasons: unlike 2231, in fact, the JCPOA did not contain any annex that prohibited missile tests with carriers intrinsically capable of carrying a nuclear bomb ( Annex B , paragraph 3) and no reference to the ban on exports. and arms imports to and from Iran. In short, in 2015, in Tehran it was absolutely convenient to consider Jcpoa and 2231 as two separate worlds, in order to be able to act freely.
As proof of this, take the words of Abbas Araghchi, Iranian deputy foreign minister and one of the most important diplomats who negotiated the JCPOA. On 20 July 2015, interviewed by the second Iranian TV channel, Araghchi stated verbatim :
“The Iranian Foreign Ministry has explicitly stated that Iran does not consider any restrictions and threats to be legitimate. If UN resolution 2231 is violated by Iran, it will be a violation of the Security Council resolution and not of the JCPO, similar to what happened ten years ago when Iran violated Security Council resolutions and nothing happened. . The text of the JCPOA underlines the fact that the content of the JCPOA and that of the UN Resolution are two separate things ”.
Therefore, it was the Iranians themselves who confirmed the American reading of the relationship between Jcpoa and 2231. One can exit from the first, an agreement between countries that has no de jure value, while remaining in the second – resolution 2231 – which instead has legal value and therefore also allows the United States to be able to invoke Article 11, which allows the reactivation of sanctions. It is therefore quite debatable to argue that the United States cannot request the snapback because it is no longer part of the JCPOA.
The text of Article 11 grants this right to the States "participating" in the JCPOA. For US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, therefore, American law exists because in 2015 – when the JCPOA was signed – the United States was among the participants. Obviously, for those who do not see it as Washington, that "Jcpoa participant State" must be interpreted not in the past, but in the present (the US has gone out and no longer enjoys that right).
As often happens in international law, a law extremely difficult to implement and often deliberately vague, it is difficult to establish unequivocally who is right and who is wrong. The fact remains that in 2015 it was the Iranians themselves who implicitly supported the thesis that the Americans are supporting today. If JCPOA and 2231 are two completely separate documents, there is no reason not yet to consider the United States as a supporter of the UN resolution.
Finally, the upcoming deadline (mid-October) of the UN embargo on arms trading with the Islamic Republic. It is disconcerting that on this issue the European Union has de facto aligned itself with the positions of Russia and China, which have a vested interest in selling arms to Tehran. In this regard, it is worth little that, as Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Merlo reminded the Senate, in the EU until 2023, limits on the export of weapons and software considered dual use to Tehran will remain in force.
Secretary Pompeo told Fox News that “weapons, tanks, air defense systems, all of this, in a couple of weeks, would be allowed to be sold to Iran. And the Europeans did not join us on this. They tell us in private 'we don't want arms sales to return', but they haven't lifted a finger ”.
A tighter legal clamp so that the first country in the world to support international terrorism does not have free access to weapons with a high destructive potential, even if they come from outside the EU, should be a moral imperative of the European Union. Especially if this state, the Iranian regime, is already violating the limits on uranium enrichment, already has ballistic missiles capable of reaching Europe and publicly declares its intention to destroy Israel, a UN country allied to Europe. To consider the upcoming expiration of the UN arms embargo on Iran as a mere bureaucratic issue, or worse an occasion to spite the Trump administration, is an insult to the values on which the EU claims to be founded. Especially if this deadline comes a few weeks after the explosions in Beirut and in the same period in which it was made known that, even in Italy, Hezbollah had hidden dangerous ammonium nitrate deposits to carry out attacks.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/sanzioni-ed-embargo-sulle-armi-alliran-lue-si-allinea-a-russia-e-cina-contro-le-richieste-di-washington/ on Tue, 22 Sep 2020 03:41:00 +0000.