US sanctions Iranian Guardian Council members, holds off on UN snapback penalties
The Trump administration is coming under pressure from anti-Iran deal advocates to find a way to trigger the "snapback" of UN sanctions this year.
While announcing mostly symbolic sanctions today on members of Iran’s Guardian Council ahead of Friday's Iranian parliamentary elections, top US Iran envoy Brian Hook did not commit to whether Washington planned to trigger UN “snapback” sanctions on Iran later this year.
The sanctions announced today target five officials with the 12-member, hard-liner-dominated council responsible for vetting candidates in Iran’s parliamentary elections. The council has come under fire in recent months for disqualifying large numbers of Reformist candidates for Friday's vote; Hook said the council members “oversee a process that silences the voice of the Iranian people."
Hook, the US special envoy on Iran, also told journalists at the State Department, “Now that Iran has violated the nuclear deal, I think five times now, that caused the Europeans to invoke the dispute resolution mechanism, there isn’t much left of the deal to preserve. It’s going to start expiring in October, and the regime has violated it many times.”
He continued, “We’re enjoying some very good success with our foreign policy, denying the regime the money that it needs to fund its proxies. So we think that more nations should join our foreign policy, and the president has called for that.”
