The United States did not succeed in passing the draft-resolution, which it submitted before the UN Security Council on August 14, in order to extend the arms embargo on Iran, in line with UNSC Resolution 2231.
According to the resolution, the UN ban on conventional arms sales to and from Iran ends on October 18, that is, 15 days before the US presidential elections.
The US administration has engaged in a thorny diplomatic battle as part of its maximum pressure campaign on the regime in Tehran. President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are employing all political, diplomatic and legal means to extend the ban indefinitely.
As the US draft-resolution was met with wide rejection at the Security Council, Trump’s administration has resorted to a gap in Resolution 2231, known as the snapback process.
The process begins when a signatory to Iran’s nuclear deal (JCPOA) – as defined in UNSCR 2231 – notifies the Security Council of an issue believed to constitute “significant non-performance of commitments under the JCPOA.”
Unless the Council adopts a resolution within 30 days to ignore the complaint, all of the provisions of resolutions that had been terminated by UNSCR 2231 come back into force. This process is called snapback because all prior restrictions on Iran snap back into place.
The fact is that international law jurists at the US State Department found in this process the “gap” they were looking for to enable Washington to indefinitely extend the arms embargo on Iran, despite Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA in 2018.
However, this claim does not satisfy the other four parties to the nuclear deal, who believe that Washington has lost the right to resort to this mechanism due to its official pullout from the agreement.
Washington claims that it has already withdrawn, but it is still part of the agreement, which means it has not lost this capacity because “the deal is one thing and the Security Council resolution is another.”
But the EU parties to the agreement stressed that Washington’s attempts would create a deep rift within the Security Council on one hand, and between the United States and its traditional European allies on the other.
European diplomatic sources in Paris said that the three European parties (France, Britain and Germany) have not yet found the means to ward off what they consider to be an “imminent danger”, a threat to US-European relations and a weakening of the authority of the Security Council.
Therefore, European diplomacy is moving in every direction to find a way out, and might regard Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal for a virtual summit to discuss Iran as an opportunity.
Observers noted that Trump’s rush to resort to the snapback process was also intended to block any subsequent US leniency towards Iran in the event that Democrat Joe Biden is elected President of the United States.
