Iran Nuclear Deal: What Does “Lift” Mean?

The text of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal between Iran and the six world powers known as the P5+1, i.e. the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, uses the term “lift” to refer to the removal of sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic by the Security Council, the European Union and the United States of America.

This deal was signed in July 2015 in Vienna but, eight years later, arguments among various political camps in Iran over the exact meaning of the word “lift” continue. Opponents of the deal say “lift” means just “suspension” and argue that, since the Islamic Republic’s negotiating team did not understand the correct meaning of the word, the P5+1 slipped it into the agreement to ensure that sanctions Iran feels should be terminated have been only paused.

Iranian opponents to the JCPOA deal point as evidence to statements made by Wendy Sherman, Acting US Deputy Secretary of State when the deal was signed, who said “in order to remove [nuclear-related] sanctions, 5+1 countries and the European Union agreed to use ‘lift’ which in English means ‘suspend’ and Iranians understand it as ‘end’.”

On the other hand, Mohammad Javad Zarif, the Islamic Republic’s Foreign Minister at the time of the negotiations and who oversaw them for Iran, has said many times that the word “lift” does not mean “suspend” in United Nations texts and that it was the correct word to indicate a termination or removal of sanctions. “The friends who say that Zarif either did not understand that the word meant ‘suspension,’ or had not read the JCPOA, are not honest with God,” Zarif (who referred to himself in the third person) is later reported to have said.

Who is right: Zarif or Sherman? Does “lift” mean “suspension” as Sherman says or is it the unquestionable term for “ending” the sanctions?

The term “lift” and its derivatives has been repeated 30 times in the text of the JCPOA. The closest legal term for “lift” in Iran is the word “removal” (رفع) and this can be either permanent or temporary. But to interpret a word in a text, one must consider the intention of the authors as expressed in the text itself, either explicitly or implicitly.

The intention of the P5+1 group was, it should be plain to any observer, not the unconditional elimination of sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council, the US and the European Union. The text of the agreement was explicit and clear; that Iran must comply with the terms of deal and, if it did not, the sanctions that had been “lifted” would be imposed anew.

Since nuclear-related sanctions imposed by the European Union and the United States were based on Security Council resolutions, the “lifting” of them covered all nuclear-related sanctions. If the P5+1 had wanted to end sanctions unconditionally and permanently, they would have used standard legal or quasi-legal terms such as “termination”. Zarif himself has said that he would have liked to see the term “eradicate” in the text of the JCPOA – but this term is neither customary nor was it consistent with the P5+1 intention to make the lifting of sanctions conditional on Iranian compliance.

Zarif was right, however to say that the Security Council uses the word “lift” in its resolutions for the removal sanctions – as based on Chapter VII of the UN Charter. But the JCPOA is not the UN Charter: in this document “lift” means “remove” but not “termination” or “annulment”. The text does not hide the fact that Iran, the target of these sanctions, will be sanctioned again if it repeats actions that led to the sanctions in the first place.

Legal common sense indeed suggests that sanctions on any country are not terminated, simply suspended, when any agreement to lift the sanctions is contingent on the country’s compliance with specific terms.

The very Security Council resolutions that Zarif likes to site shows the body using the term “remove” to indicate an actual end to a clause in an agreement, or the removal of an item from an official agenda, indicating that unlike “lift” only this word denotes final and irreversible action.