The Guardian  |  April 2, 2015

Iran Nuclear Talks Inching Towards Joint Statement, Say European Diplomats

Secret parameters would be included in any agreement over the future of Iran's nuclear programme, say diplomats, as Lausanne summit enters eighth day

By Julian Borger, Lausanne

US secretary of state, John Kerry, at a window of the Beau Rivage Palace hotel, where the nuclear talks with Iran are taking place. Photo: Jean-Christophe Bott/EPA

Foreign ministers at talks in Lausanne on Iran’s nuclear programme have said they are inching towards a joint statement, which would be accompanied by a set of agreed parameters that would be kept secret, according to European diplomats.

After an all-night negotiating session, the ministers continued to make slow progress towards a consensus, but diplomats said there were still a small number of issues to be resolved before a joint statement could be made.

The negotiations in Lausanne have entered their eighth day and are two days beyond a deadline for arriving at a framework accord which was supposed to be a preliminary step before a comprehensive and detailed agreement at the end of June.

The Iranian delegation, led by foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, only wants a vague joint statement, while the US secretary of state, John Kerry, needs to bring back specifics to Washington to convince Congress not to impose new sanctions.

The compromise, say European diplomats, would be a joint statement of understanding and two or three pages of agreed “parameters” setting out points agreed by Iran and the six world powers taking part in the Lausanne talks. Those details would not be made public but would be briefed to governments and to Congress.

The parameters would include Iran’s enrichment capacity and its allowed stockpile of enriched uranium. They would describe the redesign of Iran’s heavy water reactor in Arak in such a way as to produce only tiny amounts of plutonium as a byproduct. But a few issues were still unresolved on Thursday morning.

The main restrictions on Iran’s nuclear programme would last 10 years, but some would last for a few years beyond that, including curbs on Iran’s development work on new centrifuges. What kind of curbs and how long they would last remain a matter of dispute. So does the timing of the lifting of some UN sanctions, including an arms embargo and a ban on the transfer of dual-use technology.

Another issue divides the six-nation group negotiating with Iran. The western members – the US, UK, France and Germany – want “snap-back” mechanisms that would re-impose sanctions automatically in the event of an Iranian violation. Russia and China are opposed, seeing such mechanisms as a dilution of their prerogatives as permanent members of the UN Security Council.

Zarif insisted that progress was still being made at Thursday lunchtime.

“If everything goes well, there will be a formal, public statement by midnight,” he said.

“There are always many ups and downs in negotiations, and now that I am speaking to you, there is good hope for reaching a common understanding.”

The current negotiations are the 19th round of high-level talks in the 18 months since Zarif and Kerry first met in the margins of the 2013 UN general assembly.

Zarif, Kerry, the Germany foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, and the EU foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini, held a night session on Wednesday in Lausanne’s Beau-Rivage Palace hotel, lasting more than eight hours and ending at 6am on Thursday.

The French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, joined the talks at midnight, and the UK foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, returned after a few hours’ break in the early hours. Their Russian and Chinese counterparts, Sergei Lavrov and Wang Yi, have left Lausanne and are not expected to return.

Foreign ministry political directors remained in the conference rooms even after the ministers had gone to bed, and the ministerial negotiations resumed just before 11am.

The Bloomberg news agency quoted diplomatic historian Alan Henrikson as saying that a US secretary of state had not stayed at a single site negotiating a single issue for such a long time since the 1978 Camp David negotiations with Egypt and Israel.

It is almost 100 years since America’s top diplomats spent so much time negotiating on foreign soil. The last time was the 1919 Versailles peace conference after the first world war, Henrikson said.

Original article here.