Geneva: Group 5+1 Hold Second Joint Meeting On Saturday

Geneva, Nov 24, IRNA – The foreign ministers of the Group 5+1 (the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany) who are in Geneva held a joint meeting on Saturday night. The Group 5+1 meeting took place after Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and his American counterpart John Kerry held two rounds of trilateral meetings earlier in the morning and afternoon. The joint meeting between Kerry, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his British counterpart William Hague, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, his German counterpart Guido Westerwelle and Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi took place at a time when Zarif and Ashton have held eight round of talks since the beginning of the talks in Geneva on November 20. All the foreign ministers of the Group 5+1 are in Geneva and their presence in the Swiss city is because the talks have reached a very sensitive stage. Zarif told reporters that the negotiations are underway about the details of a three-stage agreement, including joint objectives, final picture and preliminary measures. “I can assure that in no result of these negotiations, the uranium enrichment will be halted in Iran and enrichment should be part of every agreement,” Zarif said. He underlined that the negotiations in its first stage, when the discussions were about issues that were agreed upon, were easier and now they have reached several issues that different viewpoints are available about them./end