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An Iranian member of parliament on Thursday said he was urgently drafting legislation to pull Tehran from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) as retaliation for a move by European states to reimpose UN sanctions.
The plan, MP Hossein Ali Haji-Deligani told the Tasnim news agency, could be approved by parliament as early as next week.
The NPT, which Iran ratified in 1970, allows countries to acquire civilian nuclear power but bars the pursuit of atomic weapons and mandates cooperation with the UN nuclear watchdog the International Atomic Energy Agency.
"Other measures that are regrettable for the key countries of the snapback will also be taken," he added without elaborating.
"There is no one in Iran who does not believe that negotiations with these countries are useless, so we must stop all our negotiations with them until they stop this duplicitous behavior."
"Will Europe live in a safer world if they use this dispute resolution mechanism in bad faith in order to go back to Security Council resolutions that we all decided to stop? What are they trying to gain? They try to support Israel," former top nuclear negotiator Mohammad-Javad Zarif told Foreign Policy in an interview.
Speaking before the Germany, Britain and France triggered a mechanism from the 2015 international nuclear deal the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action to reimpose UN sanctions, Zarif said the troika was abusing that agreement.
"I don’t know what audacity they have in order to try to use the dispute resolution mechanism. It’s not called snapback in the JCPOA or the (United Nations) Security Council. It’s called 'dispute resolution mechanism.'"
The relative moderate added that the snapback move was part of an Israeli-Western strategy to confront Iran and thwart diplomacy.
"They use war, and then they use diplomacy, and then they use mechanisms to resolve disputes. This is indicative of bad faith."
