Even if a deal is agreed during this week’s international negotiations on key elements of Iran’s nuclear programme, much of it may be kept secret until a final deadline at the end of June, a senior European official has said.
The US secretary of state, John Kerry, and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Javad Zarif, flew back to the negotiations venue in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Wednesday and are due to resume talks on Thursday, six days before their deadline to reach a framework agreement.
That date was laid down by foreign ministers last November, after a previous deadline was missed, but European officials sought to play down expectations over what could be achieved in the next few days.
A senior European official said: “This is not the endgame this week. There will not be an an agreement by the end of this week, because the agreement will only be done when all the technical details are down and that is quite a lot.”
The official pointed instead to the greater importance of a second deadline, at the end of June, by which all the fine print and annexes of an agreement are required to be completed. The text on of that final agreement is still being worked on and 60% of it is said still to be in brackets, meaning it has not been agreed.
“What we’d like to achieve by the end of this week is an understanding on the key issues, key parameters,” the official said.
However, it is unclear how much of that “understanding” would be made public, lest it tie negotiators’ hands for the remaining three months of bargaining and draw a backlash from hardliners in Tehran and Washington.
Kerry, though, will need to have something concrete to show Congress when he returns to Washington to help fend off a move to pass a bill in mid-April that would give Congress the final say over whether any future deal is accepted or rejected.
One possibility is for a vague “fact-sheet” to be issued in public, and Kerry provide more details in a closed session of Congress. If the framework deal is reached in the coming days, foreign ministers from the other negotiating parties – the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China – are expected to converge on Lausanne for a formal declaration and public handshakes. But it would be difficult to stage such an event without releasing some details of what had been agreed.
Britain’s foreign secretary, Philip Hammond, said that all sides would have to take difficult decisions at the negotiations. “For our part, I remain clear that no deal is better than a bad deal. But we should also be clear-eyed about the alternative,” Hammond said at the Lord Mayor’s banquet at London’s Mansion House. “No deal means no restrictions on enrichment, no restrictions on research and development, and no independent monitoring or verification. It means a fundamentally more unstable Middle East, with the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the region.”
The foreign secretary called on the western powers at the talks to “strain every sinew to get a deal over the finishing line”. “The door to a nuclear deal is open, but Iran must now step through it,” Hammond said.
The main issues that would have to be in a framework deal include Iran’s capacity for enriching uranium during the lifetime of a deal, how long that lifetime should be, the future of Iran’s heavy water reactor in Arak and its underground enrichment plant at Fordow, and the timetable for lifting sanctions.
Diplomats from all sides have said that significant strides towards an agreement were made at last week’s talks at Lausanne, on the shores of Lake Geneva. This was due, to a great extent, to the presence of US energy secretary, Ernest Moniz, and Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran’s atomic energy organisation, two physicists trained at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who have resolved many of the technical problems that have held up the talks.
The issues still unsolved include how much development work on new centrifuges Iran should be able to undertake, whether it could do any enrichment at all at Fordow (the six major powers at the negotiations say it can do none) and the timing of sanctions relief.
The US and its allies are balking at Iranian demands for all UN sanctions to be lifted at the start of a deal. But there is a widespread acceptance that relief from major economic and financial sanctions must be “front-loaded” – introduced early – to help ordinary Iranians reap the rewards of the agreement quickly.
“Once there is an agreement we want to show the Iranian people that this is paying off and paves the way to a more constructive relationship with the rest of the world,” the official said.
After French diplomats warned publicly and privately during the last negotiating session that the US was in too much of a hurry to get a framework deal by the end of the month, and urged a tougher negotiating stance, there have been several rounds of transatlantic consultations in which Paris has been assured that concessions would not be made simply in order to meet the end-of-March deadline.
“We remain united, even if there are different positions on some issues,” the senior European official said.