The President of Iran, Hassan Rouhani, said today that his country is in favor of continued cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), but that it will not accept anything that is not within the framework of international rules.
"We accept the legal control of the IAEA within the framework of the international agreement on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons, but any monitoring outside those legal frameworks would be a precedent and against the interests of all developing countries," Rouhani said after a meeting with IAEA director Yuki Amano.
Amano arrived in Tehran today, nine days before the deadline set for Iran to submit a report on the military dimension of its nuclear program.
The IAEA, which is based in Vienna, is tasked with verifying whether Iran is complying with the agreement on freezing activities within the framework of the nuclear program. An agreement on this was reached by Tehran and the 5+1 Group (USA, Russia, Great Britain, France, China and Germany), and it has been implemented since January of this year.
In July, a deadline of November 24 was set to reach a final agreement on Iran's nuclear program.
Since February, six rounds of negotiations have been held, and the two sides have converged their positions. However, there are still disagreements on key issues, such as uranium enrichment in Iran.
Major powers claim that Tehran is enriching uranium to build atomic weapons, which Iran vehemently denies, saying it is doing so solely for peacetime purposes.
"Even if we reach a (general) agreement with the Group 5+1, we will need more time to negotiate the details. Therefore, it is unlikely that the final result will be reached before the given deadline - in November," Iran's Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said earlier.
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