Judiciary Official: Iran Not to Attend Talks with US under Pressure

Secretary of Iran’s Human Rights Council Mohammad Javad Larijani said pressures won’t be able to push Tehran towards talks with the US, and meantime, expressed doubt about the West’s seriousness about talks with Iran based on mutual respect and fairness.

“Negotiation with the US due to pressure is not acceptable to us,” Larijani said in the Northern city of Anzali on Wednesday, adding that such talks with Washington should be the result of a “strategy” if Tehran ever accepts to sit to the negotiating table with the US.

He underlined that any negotiations with the US should “serve Iran’s interests”, and added that the only one who can make decision about talks with Washington is the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei.

“Negotiations with the US should go under contemplation while having the country’s interests in mind; in that case will negotiate with anyone under the supervision of the Leader,” Mohammad Javad Larijani said.

Larijani voiced skepticism about the West’s seriousness about talks with Iran.

The western countries consider the Islamic Revolution as a dangerous phenomenon and Iran as the most influential country in the Middle-East, hence their animosity towards Tehran is not something that can be removed by joking at the negotiating table, he said.

Earlier today, his brother Ayatollah Sadeq Amoil Larijani who heads Iran’s Judiciary system made relevant comments on the same topic: talks with the US.

The judiciary chief said the US officials should not think that they can blackmail the Iranian nation at the negotiating table.

“Relations with the US are not easy and after all the US pressures and crimes against the Iranian people, such relations are not possible (to establish) overnight,” Amoli Larijani said in Tehran on Wednesday.

“The Americans should not imagine that they can blackmail our nation by sitting at the negotiating table with Iran,” he added.

Meantime, Amoli Larijani noted the possibility of bilateral talks between Tehran and Washington, and said negotiations with Iran would benefit the US.

“…the US will start to be wise only when it manages to win the Iranian nation’s trust”, he added.

The United States and Iran broke diplomatic relations in April 1980, after Iranian students seized the United States’ espionage center at its embassy in Tehran. The two countries have had tense relations ever since.

Tehran has been under Washington sanctions after the 1979 Islamic Revolution that toppled a US-backed monarch in the country.

The two countries’ relations deteriorated following Iran’s progress in the field of civilian nuclear technology. 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.

Also during the recent post-election events in Iran, Iranian officials found a number of documents as well as a series of confessions extracted from the detainees substantiating US attempts to stoke unrests in the country.