Iran’s missile test ‘a likely breach of United Nations resolution’

With the approval from conservative clerics and Iranian officials on the 12-member Guardians Council, the bill has now passed into law. It also states that no government in Iran is allowed to produce and use nuclear weapons according to a fatwa, or religious decree, issued by the supreme leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei.

Zangeneh said Japanese services companies will need to provide insurance coverage for their activities if they are willing to expand their presence in Iran.

On Tuesday, hard-line lawmakers had sought to prevent its approval in parliament, but 161 lawmakers voted for implementing the nuclear deal, while 59 voted against it and 13 abstained.

An early tally of the vote said 250 of Iran’s 290 MPs were present, with the numbers suggesting 17 members who attended did not vote at all.

The outlines of the bill had been approved in the Iranian Parliament on Monday.

Only legislators in the U.S. and Iran had insisted on voting on it.

The semi-official Fars news agency reported that Ali Aghar Zarei, another hardliner, broke down weeping after the vote.

The exact details of the missile test are still being scrutinized, which is why the administration has not formally taken the matter to the United Nations yet, Earnest said.

The deal requires inspections of Iran’s nuclear sites, which many observers see as a potential sticking point for a country that has resisted oversight of its nuclear program in the past. However, “this is altogether separate from the nuclear agreement that Iran reached with the rest of the world”. Tehran says it reserves the right to ramp up “peaceful” nuclear activities in the case of a “violation” by the other signatories to the deal.

Opponents of the diplomacy, including Israeli and American legislators, say it will bolster Iran’s influence in the region and will not halt a dash for nuclear weapons should the Islamic republic want them.

The agreement between Iran and the so-called P5+1 group (Britain, China, France, Russian Federation and the USA plus Germany) came after nearly two years of diplomacy. “The Guardian Council’s framework is such that, if the JCPOA has reached this stage, it is highly unlikely to derail it now”, Ellie Geranmayeh, a policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told Reuters. While Khamenei himself has neither supported nor rejected the deal in public, he frequently praised Iran’s negotiators during the talks. He dismissed the hard-liner anger as a “domestic maneuver” ahead of the February election. The deal has raised hopes among many in Iran for better economic times.

Asa Fitch and Felicia Schwartz contributed to this article.