Iran recently held their elections and elected Ebrahim Raisi as its new President. Raisi, a hardliner in the country has stated publicly that he would not meet with President Biden to discuss sanctions on Iran, however, he did add this caveat. “It’s nonnegotiable,” Raisi said of Iran’s ballistic missile program, adding that the U.S. “is obliged to lift all oppressive sanctions against Iran.”
Jake Sullivan the national security advisor to President Biden over the weekend said, "preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon remains a “paramount priority” for the United States, emphasizing that diplomacy “is the best way to achieve that.” Mr. Sullivan did not elaborate on how he was going to conduct diplomacy with an individual who himself is sanctioned by the United States government for human rights abuses.
Amnesty International stated, “That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran. In 2018, our organization documented how Ebrahim Raisi had been a member of the ‘death commission’ which forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed in secret thousands of political dissidents in Evin and Gohardasht prisons near Tehran in 1988. The circumstances surrounding the fate of the victims and the whereabouts of their bodies are, to this day, systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities, amounting to ongoing crimes against humanity."