Iran's parliament speaker threatens to review his country's cooperation with the IAEA

Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani said today, Sunday, that his country will reconsider its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency if Tehran encounters any measures he described as unfair, after three European countries decided a few days ago to activate the dispute settlement mechanism under the Iranian nuclear agreement.

"We say it outright that if, for any reason, European powers take an unfair approach to using the dispute settlement mechanism, we will seriously reconsider our cooperation with the IAEA," state television quoted Larijani as saying.

France, Britain and Germany had decided to activate the mechanism stipulated in the nuclear agreement after Iran continued to abandon its obligations under the agreement to pressure the Europeans to take measures to guarantee the benefits provided by the agreement to Tehran in exchange for reducing its nuclear program, which it lost since the United States began a policy of extreme pressure to tighten economic sanctions on it. This came after President Donald Trump withdrew from the agreement unilaterally with a view to pushing the Iranian authorities to negotiate a new agreement.

However, Tehran confirms that it will not enter into any negotiations with the United States unless matters return to what they were, and lift all the sanctions imposed on it after its withdrawal from the agreement.

Sequence of events
The three countries' move came after Iran announced last week that it would not adhere to the uranium enrichment restrictions stipulated in the nuclear deal, but said it would continue to cooperate with the UN nuclear watchdog, the agency that monitors the nuclear deal.

And activating the dispute settlement mechanism stipulated in the nuclear agreement, and may lead to the formal accusation of the three European countries to Iran of violating the terms of the agreement, and thus may eventually lead to the re-imposition of UN sanctions imposed on them according to the agreement concluded in 2015.

The mentioned mechanism includes the formation of a joint committee whose members include Iran, Russia, China, Germany, France, Britain and the European Union, in an effort to resolve the conflict.

The agreement includes an article that allows one of the parties to file a complaint against another party before a joint committee when he committed a significant breach. Articles 36 and 37 say that in the event the dispute is not resolved by the committee, it is referred to an advisory council, and it is finally presented to the UN Security Council, which imposes sanctions.

Iran has taken the past months a series of measures to gradually reduce the obligations stipulated in the agreement in order to pressure the other parties to the agreement - especially the Europeans - to take concrete steps to confront US sanctions that threaten the collapse of the agreement in its entirety.