"Many efforts should be made to bring views closer and the other sides should take tough decisions to provide for our views and ... accept the Iranian nation's rights," Araqchi said on the threshold of a trilateral meeting among the Iranian, US and EU teams of negotiators in Geneva on Monday.
Araqchi, who had Sunday said that he and Majid Takht-e Ravanchi, another Iranian deputy foreign minister, would take part in the trilateral meeting with US Undersecretary of State William Burns and head of the American delegation in talks with Iran Wendy Sherman as well as EU deputy foreign policy chief Helga Schmidt and EU foreign policy chief's senior aide Stephen Clement, added today that he would also have a bilateral meeting with the US team in Geneva after the trilateral talks.
He also said that the Iranian team will then travel to Rome to meet Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and possibly representatives of other members of the Group 5+1 (the US, Russia, China, Britain and France plus Germany) on the sidelines of a disarmament conference on Wednesday and Thursday, adding that bilateral meetings between the Iranian delegation and the British, French and German teams will possibly take place in the Italian capital.
Araqchi referred to the next round of the multilateral negotiations between Iran and the six world powers in Vienna from June 16 to 20, and expressed the hope that the two sides could reach a deal before the deadline of July 20 as stipulated in the interim Geneva agreement inked in November.
Iran and the six world powers last met in their fourth round of talks in Vienna on May 14-16. Since the November deal, the seven nations have been discussing ways to iron out differences and start drafting a final deal that would end the West’s dispute with Iran over the country’s nuclear energy program.
Iran said there has been no tangible progress in writing the draft text of the agreement and it blamed the US for the failure, saying Washington has made excessive demands beyond the agreements made in the previous rounds of talks.
Expert teams from Iran and the six world powers held two days of talks in Vienna on Wednesday and Thursday to discuss the technical aspects of the negotiations.
The talks were headed by Hamid Ba'eedinejad, the director general for political and international affairs at Iran's Foreign Ministry, and Stephen Clement, an aide to European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton.
Ba'eedinejad and Clement also met on the sidelines of a meeting between Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and Ashton in Istanbul on May 26.
In November 2013, the two sides signed an interim nuclear deal in the Swiss city of Geneva that came into force on January 20.
