President Rouhani: Recent Security Council meeting, political, historical victory for Iran

Rouhani made the remarks in a Monday meeting with senior officials of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) in Tehran, noting that the US and its President Donald Trump have been snubbed twice in the world body during past few years.

Rouhani said “the United Nations Security Council held an important meeting” in 2018, which was chaired by Trump “when I was also in New York,” and in that meeting, 14 members of the Security Council opposed his views.

“There is no precedent in history of the Security Council when 14 countries opposed [the US views],” Rouhani added.

This time, he said, the US once again was attempting to pass a resolution against Tehran on Friday, but only one country — the Dominican Republic — out of 15 members of the Security Council voted in favor of it.

“This is a big political and historical success for us,” the Iranian president added.

On Friday, the UN Security Council unanimously rejected a US resolution to extend an arms embargo on Iran that is due to expire in October in line with a landmark nuclear deal, officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), that Iran clinched with six world powers in 2015.

The resolution needed support from nine of 15 votes to pass. Eleven members abstained, including France, Germany and Britain, while the US and the Dominican Republic were the only “yes” votes.

Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif also said on Monday that failure of the US-drafted anti-Iran resolution heralds fundamental changes in international relations.

“What happens in the world is no more a function of interactions among major powers,” Zarif said, emphasizing that the world has entered a post-West era.

“We have witnessed failure of important hegemonic powers in the world to obtain their desired goals at different junctures. This has been a long-standing process which started from the Vietnam War,” he said.

Elsewhere in his remarks, Rouhani also pointed to Iran’s two-time victories against the US at the International Court of Justice (ICJ), and said it was unprecedented in the history for the international court to rule twice during the same year against Washington in its face-off with Tehran.

“These are all a reality,” the Iranian president emphasized.

In February 2019, the ICJ ruled that Iran can proceed with a legal action to recover billions of dollars in frozen assets that the United States said must be paid to purported American survivors and relatives of victims of attacks spuriously blamed on the Islamic Republic.

Judges at the Hague-based tribunal dismissed Washington’s allegations the case should be thrown out, and that the court did not have jurisdiction in the lawsuit.

It came after the ICJ in October 2018 ordered the United States to halt the unilateral sanctions it re-imposed on “humanitarian” supplies to Iran.

The court, which is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, announced its ruling regarding the July 2018 lawsuit brought by Tehran against Washington’s decision to re-impose unilateral sanctions following the US exit from the JCPOA.