Senior member of Iran nuclear negotiation team Abbas Araqchi said Iran will not accept any plan to partially suspend sanctions.
He made the remarks in an exclusive interview with Japan's Kyodo News in Vienna on July 14.
He said Tehran will reject any plan to partially suspend sanctions over its nuclear activities as a preliminary step before their ultimate removal, as proposed by the six major countries negotiating the sanctions regime.
"If they expect irreversible measures from Iran, they should do irreversible measures too, and sanctions should be removed all together," Araqchi underlined.
"They prefer to suspend the sanctions first and then lift them but this is the concept we don't accept," he added.
The sixth round of talks between Tehran and the P5+1 (the US, Britain, France, Russia and China plus Germany) headed by Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and EU's Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton officially started in Vienna on July 3 and is still continuing in the Austrian capital with both sides describing the negotiations as hard, but constructive and positive.
Under a six-month interim deal between Iran and the P5+1 which took effect on Jan. 20, the six major powers agreed to give Iran access to its $4.2 billion in revenues blocked overseas if the country fulfills the deal's terms which offer sanctions relief in exchange for steps on curbing the Iranian nuclear program.
The U.S. and its Western allies suspect Iran of developing a nuclear weapon - something that Iran denies. The Islamic Republic has on numerous occasions stated that it does not seek to develop nuclear weapons, using nuclear energy for medical research instead.