The World Trade Organisation (WTO) on Thursday decided to start membership talks with Iran after the United States lifted its long-standing opposition to Tehran’s bid, Iran’s ambassador said.
The move came just a day after negotiations in Geneva between Iran and Britain, France and Germany resulted in a diplomatic deal to continue the talks on Iran’s controversial nuclear programme.
The three European countries had offered to help Iran’s bid for membership of the body that sets the rules for global commerce, in return for Tehran’s cooperation on the nuclear issue.
Asked if the ruling General Council of the 148-member WTO had decided to open negotiations, the Iranian ambassador to the WTO, Mohamed Reza Alborzi, said after emerging from the meeting room: ”They took it.”
Trade sources and other diplomats confirmed the move.
”We welcome the decision very much. We will be working with Iran towards its early accession,” said India’s ambassador, Ujal Singh Bhatia.
The US had opposed Iran’s repeated bids to join the WTO since 1996, blocking it at 21 successive meetings of the General Council, which requires a consensus to make decisions.
”We didn’t make a request today, we made a request nine years ago for our accession process to be started. It was blocked by the US. Then, after nine years, they accepted that,” Alborzi said.
”They blocked it for political reasons. They unblocked it apparently for political reasons.”
On Monday, White House spokesperson Scott McClellan said that Washington had given its support to the European offer in March to help Iran gain admittance to the WTO, in exchange for assurances it would abandon its nuclear efforts.
But he added: ”Obviously there are certain commitments you have to make when you seek to join the World Trade Organisation,” citing the nuclear issues as well as the need for ”transparency” in Iran’s elections due on June 14.
The date of Iran’s eventual entry into the WTO is uncertain.
”I think negotiations will take times, as is natural with everybody — I think three or four years,” Alborzi said.
In the WTO, a decision to start accession talks simply signals the beginning of painstaking negotiations with individual governments, leading to a series of bilateral trade deals.
They are then combined into a single multilateral accord covering the WTO as a whole.
It took China 15 years to join the WTO after getting a green light to start talks, and negotiations with Russia have been under way for more than a decade.
WTO members now need to establish a working party.
”We have done our homework for the past years. We have not waited until this decision was taken,” Alborzi said. ”The Iranian trade system and trade policy is more prepared for getting integrated into the WTO system, but it still will take time.”
Iran joins 30 other countries that are currently holding negotiations on joining the WTO.
Syria is the only country whose requests for accession talks since October 2001 are outstanding, having failed to gain consensus among the WTO’s membership, trade sources said. — AFP
