US must lift sanctions after leaving nuke deal: Iran

The US must "altogether and effectively" lift the "illegal" sanctions it imposed against Iran after leaving the 2015 nuclear deal, the Foreign Ministry in Tehran said.

"The US must in the first place accept, as the culprit in the current situation, to come back from the path that it has engaged in," Ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh said at a press briefing on Monday.

Currently, the US is not a member of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and it cannot attribute its own statements to actual JCPOA members or make demands from Iran as a JCPOA member, Khatibzadeh added.

The US administration must give guarantees that it will not "mock the world and international law" by repeating former President Donald Trump's behaviour of unilaterally abandoning the agreement in May 2018, and reimposed sanctions that Washington had committed to lift, he noted.

On Sunday, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in an interview on CNN that Iran has not shown willingness to fully comply with the JCPOA "despite us working closely with our allies and partners to create the negotiating circumstances for that happening".

Iran's Deputy Foreign Minister Ali Bagheri Kani will travel this week to France, Germany, the UK, and possibly Spain to discuss both regional and the JCPOA matters, after he contacts with Chinese, Russian, and EU officials before the resumption of the Vienna talks, Khatibzadeh said.

Some five months after the pause of the talks over the restoration of the nuclear deal, Iran and the European Union on November 3 announced to resume the negotiations on November 29 - IANS