Tehran, March 27, IRNA – France urged Iran Friday to make 'new efforts' to clinch a long-sought nuclear deal with global powers, as Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius prepared to join marathon talks hurtling towards a deadline.




'We wish to have an agreement and it is possible, but there has to be new progress,' Fabius told reporters ahead of his trip to Lausanne, Switzerland, intending to join the negotiations early Saturday.

'There has to be new efforts from our Iranian partners,' he insisted, according to AFP.

The negotiations in Lausanne aim to agree by Tuesday the contours of a deal that world powers leading the effort -- Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States -- hope will ensure Iran has no intention to develop nuclear weapons.

But after 18 months of talks which have criss-crossed the globe since Iranian President Hassan Rouhani took office in 2013, Tehran says it has already done enough to ally global concerns about its atomic program.

'The negotiations are difficult. They've been difficult since the beginning and they still are,' Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif told AFP before going into a second meeting of the day with top US diplomat John Kerry.

Another member of the Iranian delegation said: 'It all depends on the willingness of the other side. All the solutions are on the table.'

'We have already done what we need to do,' he added.

Rouhani made an extraordinary appeal to world leaders on Thursday writing a letter to US President Barack Obama, and in a blitz phoning his counterparts in Britain, China, France and Russia, urging them not 'to lose this exceptional opportunity.'

But Fabius told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York that Rouhani's message was 'not very precise.'

A full deal, capping more than a decade of tensions over Iran's peaceful nuclear program, is then meant to be rounded out with complex technical annexes by a June 30 deadline.


By IRNA