Draft deal reached on new Iran sanctions

01/22/2008

By Hugh Williamson in Berlin
Financial Times
Published: January 22 2008 22:57 | Last updated: January 22 2008 22:57


World powers ended weeks of deadlock over whether to press ahead with a fresh raft of sanctions against Iran by agreeing to a new United Nations draft resolution that is weaker than the US might have wished but leaves the international community united.

The resolution, agreed at a meeting of foreign ministers from the permanent members of the UN Security Council and Germany in Berlin on Tuesday, represented a “moderate tightening” of the sanctions regime against Tehran, diplomats said.

European diplomats indicated that the agreement had been reached because all sides had been willing to compromise. They argued that the US now accepted last month’s assessment by US intelligence that Iran had abandoned its plans to militarise its nuclear capability in 2003 made a tough new resolution impossible. But at the same time, Russia and China accepted that the international community would look weak if it failed to press home its concerns about Iran’s continued uranium enrichment.

A US official said the third round of sanctions, if adopted by the Security Council, would place more Iranian officials under an international travel ban and freeze more Iranian assets than under the second round, adopted in March 2007. He said some “new elements” would be included, without elaborating. He expected the resolution to be “passed in the next few weeks”.

Mr Steinmeier said the meeting, and the draft resolution, were aimed at showing Iran that world powers still shared “a common, unchanged concern” over Tehran’s nuclear programme, which Iran insists is solely for civilian use.

The US official said the two hours of talks had centred on exchanges between Condoleezza Rice, US secretary of state, and Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. “The two were working together to find common ground,” he said.

He indicated that Iran had hoped that the unity of the six countries had been ­weakened.

Diplomats noted that the current sanctions against Iran, focused on Tehran’s nuclear industry, were relatively modest, and that the new measures would add to these rather than take in other parts of the economy.

Washington has been pushing for wider sanctions, to include, for instance, controls on ties with Iranian state banks.