‘West not ready for constructive talks with Iran’

Ambassador Mohammad Khazaei made the remarks at a press conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York on Friday, IRNA reported.

Commenting on the latest round of talks with the P5+1 group in Moscow and the Iranian negotiators’ readiness to resolve the remaining disagreements, he said that the Iranian nation knows how to deal with foreign pressure without bowing to the illegitimate demands of the West.

He went on to say that the main focus of the P5+1 negotiations with Tehran is the recognition of Iran’s right to enrich uranium and that based on Article 4 of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), all signatory states have the right to have civilian nuclear programs.

In a June 28 letter to European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who heads the P5+1 group’s delegation to the talks, the secretary of Iran's Supreme National Security Council, Saeed Jalili, advised the P5+1 group to avoid adopting ‘unconstructive measures’ during the talks with the Islamic Republic.

Iran and the P5+1 group -- Britain, China, France, Russia, the United States, and Germany -- wrapped up two days of talks in Moscow on June 19.

Iran’s nuclear energy program was at the heart of the Moscow negotiations, with Tehran standing firm on its inalienable right to enrich uranium in order to produce fuel for its nuclear reactors.

The two sides have agreed to continue the talks at expert level meetings in Istanbul on July 3.

Iran and the P5+1 group held three sessions of plenary talks in Baghdad in May after an earlier round of negotiations in Istanbul in mid-April.

They had previously held two rounds of talks, one in Geneva in December 2010 and another in Istanbul in January 2011.

Iran says that as a signatory to the NPT and a member of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), it has the right to enrich uranium to produce fuel for its nuclear reactors.
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