EU agrees Iran sanctions

European Union foreign ministers on Monday agreed sanctions on Iran to raise pressure over its nuclear program but also held open the door to fresh talks.
Officials said the sanctions would be broadly the same as those listed in a United Nations resolution in December, meant to try to force Iran to suspend nuclear work which the west suspects aims to produce bombs. But EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who reopened tentative contacts with Iran on Sunday, said fresh talks were also a possibility."We want to maintain dialogue and Iran knows what we want to do," he told reporters as he arrived for a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Brussels. He said a meeting with chief Iranian nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani on Sunday on the margins of a conference in Munich had been "good and constructive" but gave no further details." Now what we have to do is to look at the proposal that the Iranians are presenting," German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pledged on Sunday to pursue Iran's nuclear program but also said Tehran was ready for talks.
These were put on hold last year as Iran pressed ahead with its nuclear program in defiance of international calls.
SANCTIONS AGREED - EU diplomats said that the package of sanctions had been agreed in principle but had to be overlooked by lawyers and translated before it became formalized, a process that could take another week. The United States had accused the EU of dragging its feet on implementing the sanctions and urged it to follow it with measures such as banning business with Iran's Bank Sepah. "The EU text transcribes the U.N. sanctions one-on-one in a very strict and stringent manner," one EU diplomat said of a text being drafted by EU diplomats. "If you want to go further on some points it takes time, and we wanted to be fast," the diplomat said, referring to the need to get consensus among the EU's members. "But the text leaves the possibility (to go further) in the future." The United Nations imposed preliminary sanctions on Iran in December over its failure to prove its experimental efforts to enrich uranium were geared solely to generating electricity. The U.N. measures against Tehran ban the transfer of sensitive nuclear materials to Iran, freeze financial assets of those linked with the nuclear program and ask countries to pass on information about those on the list.Tehran, a major energy exporter, rejects Western suspicions its nuclear program is aimed at acquiring nuclear bombs and says it is meant only to generate electricity.