Iran Press/Europe: Paris expects Tehran's full return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), he wrote in message posted on Twitter on Friday after six European countries joined the INSTEX financial mechanism to fulfill the E3 countries' (Germany, UK, France) commitments to the JCPOA.
Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden announced in a joint statement that they are in a process of attaching the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX) for helping the E3 countries, the European party of Iran's nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), to facilitate legitimate trade between Europe and Iran.
The six European countries' statement was published on Friday on the Finland Foreign Ministry's website.
The JCPOA, commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal, was signed in 2015 between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council- China, France, Russia, UK, US- plus Germany- together with the European Union.
In May 2018 US President Donald Trump announced that he was withdrawing from the JCPOA and reimposing sanctions on Iran.
A year later, Iran announced that it would gradually downgrade its nuclear commitments unless the EU, France, the UK, and Germany take measures to save the deal.
With the US scrapping JCPOA, the E3 countries promised to compensate for the unilateral exit of the US through the INSTEX which was set up to try to enable legitimate trade with Iran to continue without falling foul of US sanctions.
After a series of negotiations between Iran and EU officials to implement INSTEX, Iran declared that E3 can't secure Iran's interests in the economic frameworks and no practical measures have been undertaken to launch the mechanism.
Iran, then, notified its remaining partners in the deal that it would suspend the implementation of some of its commitments as a "wake-up call" to spur the European signatories to honor their end of the bargain.
Earlier on Wednesday, Le Drian threatened Iran to reimpose multilateral sanctions saying France is investigating the announcement of a dispute settlement mechanism known as the 'Grim Trigger Mechanism', referring to the scale-back measures of Iran toward the JCPOA.
Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman criticized the French Foreign Minister's threat over Tehran's scale-back measures to the JCPOA and said such expressions harm the efficacy of initiatives to fully implement the deal.
Referring to Le Drian's remarks on 'Grim Trigger Mechanism', Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Seyed Abbas Mousavi said that in the current situation JCPOA does not allow the Europeans to practice the strategy against Iran which is defending its right against the US unilateral withdrawal from the international deal.
He said the French FM's remarks were irrelevant and unconstructive and severely undermined the effectiveness of political initiatives to fully implement the JCPOA by all parties following the removal of the JCPOA-related sanctions and the implementation of JCPOA Joint Commission's approvals.
The 'Grim Trigger Strategy', the Iranian FM spokesman said, has been designated to take into account the bilateral remedial measures between Iran and the other sides in the nuclear deal, so under Article 36 of the very deal and with the US unilateral exit from JCPOA, Europe basically cannot use the trigger mechanism against Iran.
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