Iranian President Rouhani: JCPOA Was an Important Political Achievement Because UNSC Acknowledged Our Right to Enrich Uranium

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said in a July 14, 2019 address that aired on IRINN TV (Iran) that the JCPOA had been advantageous for Iran because it allowed Iran to legally enrich uranium. He said that the U.N. Security Council had said that Iran's right to enrich uranium must be supported, and he explained that this was an important legal and political achievement since the Security Council did not say this about any country other than Iran. Rouhani also said that the JCPOA benefited Iran from an economic perspective and that it enabled Iran to launch 14 phases at the South Pars Gas-Condensate field.

President Hassan Rouhani: "The Americans withdrew from the [JCPOA] 14 months ago. Some people... In Iran they were rare, but elsewhere there were people who said that the nuclear agreement ultimately benefited America and not us. If it benefited America, why did it withdraw from it? Why did America violate the agreement? Why did America say that this was the worst agreement in its history? Why did senior American officials say that Iran got everything in this agreement? What we wanted was to make our enrichment of uranium legal. We were enriching uranium before, but the UNSC resolution denied us of this using a false and incorrect pretext, obviously. They said that because Iran had committed a violation, it lost its right to uranium enrichment.

"In the negotiations, we made our enrichment legal. Not only did we make it legal, but...There is another point that I'd like to draw your attention to. Every country has the right to enrich uranium in a certain framework: The NPT, [nuclear] safeguards, or whatever... But the UNSC did not say that any other country in the world has the right to enrich uranium and that the world must support it. This is true with regard to Iran. You will find no other such country. In 2015, the UNSC passed Resolution 2231 unanimously – the U.S. also voted for it – which said that Iran has the right to enrich uranium. This was a very important legal and political achievement for us. Later, we also had good opportunities from the economic perspective. This was important. You can see that in the South Pars Gas-Condensate field, we managed to launch 14 phases at the same time.

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"The JCPOA made it possible for us to launch the phases in South Pars."