Geneva deal cracked openings in Iranian nation’s favor: EU parliament member

Young journalists club

News ID: 2986
Publish Date: 8:48 - 17 December 2013
The head of the European Parliament delegation visiting Iran, Tarja Cronberg, said on Monday night that Iran’s nuclear deal with six world powers cracked openings for offering humanitarian aides to the Iranian nation.
Cronberg who was speaking at a press conference said that the parliamentary relations must be bilateral; adding that during this trip the EP delegation had visited the centers for campaign against narcotics, which is one of the fields in which the EU is ready for cooperation with Iran.

"That is because after being transited through Iran a major part of those narcotic drugs are used in Europe,” she said.

The European parliamentarian added, "In EU-Iran relations we pursue two different paths, one policy in diplomatic and the other in sanction-reduction field, and we had never intended these sanctions to have effects against the Iranian nation.”

"We believe the two sides need to acquire a better understanding of each other and in order to improve this cognition, we can have cooperation in cultural, educational and environmental, cooperation, and cooperation in other fields,” added Cronberg.

She said that the visit can lead to gaining deeper insight about Iran for the European parliamentarians.

The host of the EP delegation, Kazem Jalali, the head of the Iranian Parliament’s Research Center, too, advised the European lawmakers to try to see the realities about Iran so that they could have realistic analyses about this country.

Jalali said that the Iranian nation is faced with unjust sanctions, while on the other hand, which have strengthened their national will for accelerating the country’s development projects on the one hand, and affected the lives of the women, children
and elderly folks on the other hand.

He also expressed hope that the EP delegation’s visit would lead to improving the insights of the two sides about each other.

The delegation that arrived in Tehran on Friday visited an exhibition by anti-narcotics police and had a meeting with Alaeddin Boroujerdi, the chairman of Parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission.

The delegation headed by Tarja Cronberg, who is a member of the Foreign Affairs Committee and Subcommittee of Security and Defence in the EP, also had a meeting with the Iranian Parliament Speaker Ali Larijani on Monday.

Among the other members of the visiting European team are Cornelia Ernst, Josef Weidenholzer, Marietje Schaake and Isabelle Durant.
 
The visit comes at the invitation of Kazem Jalali, the head of the Iran’s Parliament’s Research Center.


During their stay, the European parliamentarians also met a number of other Iranian officials, Iranian film director Ja’far Panahi, and lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh.

The EP is the directly elected parliamentary institution of the European Union (EU).

Cronberg also chairs an EP body known as the European Parliament's delegation for relations with Iran, which was established following the 2004 European elections, as a means for establishing a direct channel of communication between the EP and
the Iranian legislative body.

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