Iran formally requested a meeting of the commission that oversees its nuclear deal with world powers to complain about the renewing of sanctions by the United States, state television reported Saturday.
The request was made in a letter by Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif to the European Union’s foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini, calling for “a meeting of the joint commission outlined in the nuclear deal... regarding the recent actions of the United States.”
On Thursday, Washington extended the Iran Sanctions Act — which mostly seeks to limit Iran’s oil and gas trade — for another decade.
Although it received overwhelming support from the US Congress, the act will have no effect since its measures are suspended as long as the nuclear deal remains in place.
President Barack Obama has said that renewing the act was pointless, and symbolically allowed it to become law without signing it, although he denied it was a breach of the nuclear deal, which came into effect last January.
Iranian leaders, including supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani, disagree, calling it a “clear violation.”
The nuclear deal allows for the signatories — Iran, the US, Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia — to hold a “joint commission” to discuss claims of a violation.
Iran has been frustrated by the limited economic benefits of the accord, which removed many international sanctions in exchange for curbs to its nuclear program.
Although it has managed to significantly ramp up its oil exports, Tehran has struggled to rejoin the international financial system because Washington has maintained a raft of other sanctions related to non-nuclear issues that have helped deter major Western banks from returning to Iran.
In another development, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei condemned Britain on Saturday as a “source of evil and misery” for the Middle East after British Prime Minister Theresa May called Iran a regional threat.
“Shamelessly, the British have recently called ... Iran a threat to the region, but everyone knows that ... it is the British who have always been the source of threats, corruption and misery,” the state news agency IRNA quoted Khamenei as telling participants at an Islamic unity conference in Tehran.
Khamenei called “policies and the actions of the British in the past two centuries a source of evil and misery for the peoples of the region,” IRNA added.
May called on Gulf Arab heads of state at a summit last week to work with London “to push back against Iran’s aggressive regional actions, whether in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Syria or in the Gulf itself.”
“So I want to assure you that I am clear-eyed about the threat that Iran poses to the Gulf and the wider Middle East,” she told the summit in Bahrain on Dec. 7.
Khamenei accused the United States and Britain of provoking conflicts among the main Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam and said: “The old British policy of ‘divide and conquer’ is seriously on the agenda of Islam’s enemies.”
Iranian media reported on Saturday that the Foreign Ministry had summoned a top British diplomat in Tehran to protest against British criticism of its actions in Syria.
The move came after British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on Thursday he had summoned the ambassadors of Russia and Iran to convey his “profound disquiet” over events in the besieged Syrian city of Aleppo.
Britain and Iran exchanged ambassadors in September more than a year after Britain reopened its Tehran embassy, which was closed for nearly four years after it was stormed by protesters.

Source: Arab News