Q - Can we have your comment on Teheran's announcement about stopping uranium enrichment? Given the present situation, do you think there's any need for the debate in the Security Council?

A - First, I want to say that we distributed the text of our communiqué from last night on the agreement which the three European countries, France, Germany, and the UK, reached with the support of Javier Solana, on one side, and Iran on the other. I imagine you've seen the communiqué. There's not much to add because each word was carefully considered.

Clearly, there's an important stage in this agreement, in all the efforts we've made with our partners, to build confidence regarding the nature of Iran's nuclear program, on the concerns it raised.

It is essential now for the agreement to be fully implemented. The director general of the IAEA, Dr. ElBaradei, has to write up his report for the board of governors, which meets on November 25, and he is obviously now in a position to incorporate in this report the elements resulting from yesterday's agreement, the so-called Paris agreement, i.e. on Iran's suspension of all its enrichment- and reprocessing-related activities.

I think this aspect will be taken on board in Dr. ElBaradei's report, and obviously this creates a new situation compared with the situation which existed at the time of previous IAEA board meetings.

Beyond that, there are provisions for negotiations, starting in the first half of December, on a long-term agreement, with a steering committee which will formally launch these negotiations, a series of working groups that are going to begin to cover the political and security problems, cooperation and especially technological cooperation and nuclear questions. The idea is to move forward like that towards a long-term agreement that would give us objective guarantees on the strictly civilian aims of the Iranian program and lead to progress in all these areas of cooperation that I mentioned. That is, basically to open the way to closer cooperation between the European Union and Iran and to develop relations between them.

In two words, that's our thinking, but you have the text of the agreement and you will see that it's very precise; there's the list of everything that Iran is to do on freezing enrichment and there's also everything that the EU, the Europeans may do, and there's a specific reference to the development of a trade and cooperation agreement, the possibility of negotiations and Iran's accession to the World Trade Organization. In short, there's a whole series of aspects that are going to be covered in coming months which are going to enable us to move forward.

That's what we wanted to hail yesterday.

I invite you to read the text of the agreement closely, and if you have questions later, don't hesitate to call us. We'll help you with the answers.