Obama Administration: JCPOA is not
"Legally Binding", Posted 11/26/15, by Alice Greene.
Things have
just gone nuclear (no pun intended) regarding Obama’s pet deal with Iran. After
receiving a letter from a concerned Kansas lawmaker, the Obama Administration
admitted that the deal is not "legally binding."
Apparently, the president didn’t think it important to make sure the
Iranian leaders actually signed the agreement. “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of
Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed
document,” reads the letter sent by a State Department assisstant
secretary to Kansas Rep. Mike Pompeo.
The letter,
written earlier this month by Julia Frifield, comes as a response to a letter
sent to Secretary of State John Kerry from Pompeo after he noticed that
the version of JCPOA submitted to Congress was not signed. Frifield
assured Pompeo that the document viewed by Congress was the final version.
Rather than a formal agreement, she described the deal as a set of “political
commitments.”
“The success of
the JCPOA will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but
rather on the extensive verification measures we have put in place, as well as
Iran’s understanding that we have the capacity to re-impose – and ramp up – our
sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments,” wrote Frifield.
I'm not
convinced. This is what Iran's president said after asking his country's
parliament to abstain from voting on the nuclear agreement: “If the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will
create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has
not signed it so far, will have to sign it. Why should we place an unnecessary
legal restriction on the Iranian people?”
It is
statements like this that caused Pompeo to write to the Secretary of State in
the first place. “Those signatures represent the commitment of the signatory
and the country on whose behalf he or she is signing,” writes Pompeo. “A signature
also serves to make clear precisely who the parties to the agreement are and
the authority under which that nation entered into the agreement. In short,
just as with any legal instrument, signing matters.”
No comments:
Post a Comment