ABSTRACT

Formal relations between the European Union (EU) and the Islamic Republic of Iran commenced with the Edinburgh Declaration in 1992. This declaration came more than a decade after the 1979 revolution, four years after the UN-brokered ceasefire that ended the Iran-Iraq war (1980-8) and barely three years after the Islamic Republic of Iran’s founder, Grand Ayatollah Rouhollah Mousavi Khomeini (the ‘imam’), passed away in 1989. Hence, after a decade of de facto no relations between Europe and Iran, European heads of state and government decided to examine how to conduct EU-Iranian relations in the future.1