Senior MP calls for practical change in west’s Iran policy

A senior Iranian lawmaker said that the western countries should show more than utterance of mere words and take practical change in their policies on Iran if they are willing to take up a sound and logical path towards Tehran. “We hope that the trend of Iran-Group 5+1 talks in Geneva would head towards (achieving) practical results and strategies,” Isfahan Deputy at the Parliament Hamid Reza Fouladgar told FNA on Monday. “The team of western-US negotiators should try to avoid seeking useless pretexts and putting irrational hurdles on the path of the upcoming talks, specially in Geneva, and proceed by observing principles of logic and fairness,” he added. Iran and the world powers held a meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly session in New York in September and are due to meet again in Geneva on October 15-16. On April 6, Iran and the six world powers wrapped up two days of intensive negotiations in Almaty, but without making any major breakthrough. Washington and its western allies accuse Iran of trying to develop nuclear weapons under the cover of a civilian nuclear program, while they have never presented any corroborative evidence to substantiate their allegations. Iran denies the charges and insists that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes only. Tehran stresses that the country has always pursued a civilian path to provide power to the growing number of Iranian population, whose fossil fuel would eventually run dry. Despite the rules enshrined in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) entitling every member state, including Iran, to the right of uranium enrichment, Tehran is now under four rounds of UN Security Council sanctions and the western embargos for turning down West's calls to give up its right of uranium enrichment. Tehran has dismissed West's demands as politically tainted and illogical, stressing that sanctions and pressures merely consolidate Iranians' national resolve to continue the path. Tehran has repeatedly said that it considers its nuclear case closed as it has come clean of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)'s questions and suspicions about its past nuclear activities.