Tehran, Iran, May 15
By Mehdi Sepahvand – Trend:
Iran is able to use the existing diplomatic channels that it established in recent years to push for the removal of the remaining economic sanctions, Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi said.
He made the remarks regarding President Hassan Rouhani’s expression of readiness to push for the removal of the sanctions if he is made president for a second term in the May 19 election, IRIB news agency reported May 15.
“However,” Qassemi noted, “these sanctions are hard to deal with since they have roots in certain issues with idiosyncratic complications.”
In his presidential campaign, Rouhani has been voicing willingness in recent days to negotiate the removal of what remains of sanctions against Iran after he successfully made a deal on a set of nuclear-related sanctions in 2015.
Negotiating the sanctions, however, needs a green light from Iran’s conservatives, not least of which Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who is even critical of the very nuclear deal.
Existing sanctions on Iran come from a variety of grounds. A set of them, called US primary sanctions, date back to the 1980s after the hostage crisis, restricting the use of the US dollar for Iran.
Another set comes from the 1990s, when the Clinton administration put an embargo on deals with Iran in the energy sector, which came to be known as the Iran Sanctions Act (ISA).
Other sanctions are founded on claims related to human rights status and ballistic missiles.