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JCPOA Joint Commission to convene on April 20

The commission had two offline meetings last week to discuss prospects for the United States’ possible return to the deal and steps needed to ensure full and efficient compliance with the deal’s terms by all its signatories

VIENNA, April 19. /TASS/. The Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) will have another meeting on April 20 to analyze what has been done by experts in terms of the restoration of the Iran nuclear deal, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the Vienna-based international organizations Mikhail Ulyanov said on Monday.

"The participants in the Vienna talks decided that the Joint Commission of JCPOA will reconvene once again on April 20 to take stock of the work done by expert-level working groups and consider next steps," he wrote on Twitter.

The Russian diplomat said earlier that the talks had entered a "drafting stage," with the parties having "moved from general words to agreeing on specific steps towards the goal."

The Joint Commission had two offline meetings last week to discuss prospects for the United States’ possible return to the deal and steps needed to ensure full and efficient compliance with the deal’s terms by all its signatories. The commission members continue to discuss ways of restoring the nuclear deal at informal meetings in various formats, including at an expert level.

The JCPOA, also known as the Iran nuclear deal, was signed between Iran, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (Russia, the United Kingdom, China, the United States and France) and Germany in 2015. Under the deal, Iran undertook to curb its nuclear activities and place them under total control of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in exchange of abandonment of the sanctions imposed previously by the United Nations Security Council, the European Union and the United States over its nuclear program.

The future of the deal was called in question after the United States’ unilateral pullout in May 2018 and Washington’s unilateral oil export sanctions against Tehran. Iran argued that all other participants, Europeans in the first place, were ignoring some of their own obligations in the economic sphere, thus making the deal in its current shape senseless. This said, it began to gradually scale down its commitments under the deal.