Talks End; will Resume Wednesday--P5+1 Rifts on Sanction Relief

The Guardian reports "the official reason for the adjournment is the need for members of Iranian delegation to attend the funeral on Sunday of President Hassan Rouhani’s mother, who died on Friday aged 90. But the talks had already stalled because of differences over sanctions, and the emergence of splits within the group of six major powers on how tough a position to take. The sharpest split is between the US, which had proposed a scheme for a phased lifting of UN sanctions in return for concrete Iranian actions to limit its nuclear programme, and France, which wants to offer only a symbolic easing of the punitive measures imposed over the past decade.
Diplomats say the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, telephoned the French delegation in Lausanne to ensure it did not make further concessions, and to insist that the bulk of UN sanctions could only be lifted if Iran gave a full explanation of evidence suggesting it may have done development work on nuclear warhead design in the past. “We have been negotiating with Iran for 12 [years]. We shouldn’t be rushed into an agreement which will have to be comprehensive,” the French ambassador to Washington, Gerard Araud, tweeted during the talks.

The French position is unacceptable to the Iranians, who argue they would never be able to prove a negative, and disprove evidence of a weapons programme they say is forged. “They don’t like it. They say it’s a deal-breaker. They don’t want it at all,” said a European diplomat involved in the talks. But the diplomat added there was “no way” France would relax its position.
The US offer on sanctions is to lift UN sanctions in layers in return each “irreversible” step Iran makes to scale down and limit its nuclear programme. There would be mechanisms in place by which sanctions would “spring back” if Iran violated the agreement, without the need for consensus in the UN security council. It is broadly supported by the UK and Germany, while Russia and China, the other members of the six-nation group, would offer more generous terms.
Tehran is reluctant to accept sanctions relief based on milestones . . .

                                                                                                 [Khamenei's Tweet inserted by me]
. . .but diplomats say the French position would be a complete deal-breaker. They say the Iranians would be very unlikely to admit past weapons work, which if revealed would demonstrate that the country’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had misled the world. Better, US diplomats argue, to focus on limiting the current Iranian programme and worry about allegations about the past a few years down the road.