ISTANBUL

Iran denounced the reimposition of UN sanctions on Sunday as “illegal,” accusing the Europeans of abusing the 2015 nuclear deal.

“The attempt to revive terminated resolutions is not only legally baseless and unjustifiable, but also entirely unacceptable from moral and logical standpoints,” the Iranian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

“The Islamic Republic of Iran will vigorously defend Iran’s national rights and interests, and any move intended to harm the rights or interests of the Iranian people will be met with an appropriate and decisive response,” it added.

Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi also sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on the decision by the UK, France, and Germany, also known as E3, to invoke the snapback mechanism under Resolution 2231 to reimpose sanctions on Iran for non-compliance with its nuclear obligations.

“The E3, having breached their obligations under both the JCPOA and resolution 2231, have lost any standing to invoke ‘significant non-performance.’ Their invocation of the so-called snapback mechanism is simply a stark abuse of process,” Araghchi said in the letter.

He said the E3’s move is “legally and procedurally flawed and is therefore null and void,” citing that the European signatories of the nuclear deal refused to uphold their obligations and failed to exhaust the Dispute Resolution Mechanism (DRM) under the deal following Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities in June.

This “fundamentally altered the circumstances, rendering those terminated resolutions obsolete and detached from present realities.”

The UN sanctions on Iran came back into force on Sunday for the first time in a decade after the E3 invoked the snapback mechanism, accusing Tehran of violating its nuclear obligations.

The sanctions bar dealings related to Tehran’s nuclear and ballistic missiles program and are also expected to have wider effects on the country’s economy.