Fluet Partner Dave Jonas recently co-authored an article titled “JCP-No-Way: A Critique of the Iran Nuclear Deal as a Non-Legally Binding Political Commitment.” The article appeared in the Journal of National Security Law and Policy.
The Iran Nuclear Deal was implemented on January 16, 2016, requiring “Iran to dispose of or phase out most of its enriched uranium and centrifuges.” This agreement was negotiated amidst concerns that Iran had the tools to create a nuclear weapons program through its uranium enrichment capabilities.
In this article, Jonas and Georgetown University Law Center student Dyllan Taxman argue that it “was novel and inappropriate as it substituted a nonbinding political document for what would normally have been handled in a legally binding document, which is nearly always the initial goal of such negotiations.”
They specifically highlight how unusual this type of agreement is in the context of America’s history of such agreements.
The article concludes with the claim that “it appears facially inappropriate that the solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis could be a handshake agreement.”
Although negotiating the deal as a treaty or other legally binding agreement would have required more time and effort, the authors propose that the benefits of a legally binding agreement would have outweighed those costs.
Read the full article here.
