Zarif Documents Western Breach of JCPOA in Last Letter as Iran’s FM to UN Chief

By Staff, Agencies

In his last letter as the foreign minister of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the United Nations secretary-general, Mohammad Javad Zarif compiled all documents about six years of Western noncompliance with the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action [JCPOA] the nuclear deal signed in 2015.

Zarif’s last letter to Antonio Guterres has been released in the form of a 200-page book.

The book is titled “Letter to the UN Secretary-General: Documenting Six Years of Western [Non-] Implementation of the ‘Iran Nuclear Deal’.”

In the book, published by the Institute for Political and International Studies [IPIS], Foreign Minister Zarif said:

“On the occasion of the sixth anniversary of the unanimous adoption of UN Security Council Resolution 2231 [2015], I wrote a summarizing letter to the UN Secretary-General and annexed to it an issue-based compilation of the aforementioned letters. This book is comprised of that letter and its annexes, which are being circulated, as I write this preface, as documents of the General Assembly [A/75/968] and of the Security Council [S/2021/669].”

“My letters are self-explanatory, representing a chronology of implementation issues, which started long before Trump took office in January 2017. The letters substantiate every assertion that has been made, but I do not claim to present the whole story. I am confident that my domestic and international detractors will find much to disagree with and criticize in this book—which is being published in English and Persian simultaneously for transparency, and ease of reference. Yet I can make one categorical statement: None of my letters to the Coordinator of the JCPOA Joint Commission, all of which were distributed to every JCPOA Participant, were ever rebutted by any one of them. This may be the result of either having nothing legal or logical to say in response at the time of each letter—particularly as I was only stating self-evident facts in each instance,” Zarif has explained.