Iran (Nuclear Talks)

Philip Hollobone Excerpts

Tuesday 25th November 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Philip Hollobone (Kettering) (Con)]

In his statement, the Foreign Secretary confirmed that the November 2013 interim agreement commits Iran to freezing certain areas of its nuclear programme in return for limited sanctions relief and the repatriation of $4 billion-worth of oil revenues. Although the sanctions relief and the oil revenues are transparent and measurable, freezing areas of its nuclear programme is not. Given that there is either limited or no inspections access to nuclear and weapons facilities at Fordow, Natanz, Arak and Parchin, how confident can he be that Iran is freezing these areas of nuclear development, and is not secretly using this extended deadline to produce enough fissile material to develop nuclear weapons?

[Mr Hammond]

We are highly confident of that. The technical representatives of the E3 plus 3 review these issues regularly. We do have access to and visibility of what is going on. The arrangements under the interim agreement for monitoring are effective, and we are confident that Iran is complying with its obligations—in some cases, complying with our interpretation of an obligation even where there may be some uncertainty in the wording of the document itself.