BAKU, Azerbaijan, July 13. The US unlawfully withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), said Iranian President-elect Masoud Pezeshkian, TurkicWorld reports.
"The US also needs to recognize the reality and understand, once and for all, that Iran does not - and will not - respond to pressure. We entered the JCPOA in 2015 in good faith and fully met our obligations. But the US unlawfully withdrew from the agreement motivated by purely domestic quarrels and vengeance, inflicting hundreds of billions of dollars in damage to our economy, and causing untold suffering, death, and destruction on the Iranian people - particularly during the Covid pandemic - through the imposition of extraterritorial unilateral sanctions," he wrote in an article, published by Iranian media.
Masoud Pezeshkian added that "the US and its Western allies have abused the non-proliferation regime to fabricate a crisis regarding Iran's peaceful nuclear program".
"They are openly contradicting their own intelligence assessment - and use it to maintain sustained pressure on our people, while they have actively contributed to and continue to support the nuclear weapons of Israel, an apartheid regime, a compulsive aggressor and a non-NPT member and a known possessor of an illegal nuclear arsenal," he noted.
Meanwhile, in late 2020, the Iranian parliament adopted a strategic plan to counter the sanctions, citing the non-fulfillment of the JCPOA signed between Iran and six countries and the imposition of sanctions on Iran.
Based on the decision of the Iranian parliament, as of February 23, Iran stopped the implementation of additional measures and an additional protocol included in the nuclear deal. As a consequence, the monitoring mechanism of the IAEA was reduced by 20-30 percent.
