Diplomat of Fruitless Negotiations; Who is Ali Bagheri Kani?

Following the death of Hossein Amirabdollahian, the Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic, in a helicopter crash that also involved Ibrahim Raisi, Ali Bagheri Kani, the political deputy of Iran's Foreign Ministry, became the caretaker of this ministry. According to the laws of the Islamic Republic, this ministry can be managed by a caretaker for a maximum of three months until the next foreign minister is elected. According to Article 135 of the Constitution, when a ministry lacks a minister, the President can appoint someone to oversee it for a maximum of three months, and now, in the absence of the President, Mohammad Mokhber Dezfuli, the acting President, has made this decision. Who is Ali Bagheri Kani and what has been his record and positions? Ali Bagheri Kani, a 57-year-old diplomat of the Islamic Republic, is part of the inner circle of Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic. His brother, Misbah al-Huda Bagheri Kani, is married to Hedi Khamenei, the daughter of the Supreme Leader. Both are graduates of Imam Sadiq University, an ideological center for training the political class in the Islamic Republic. His father, Mohammad Baqer Bagheri Kani, was a cleric, a former member of the Assembly of Experts, and the nephew of Mohammad Reza Mahdavi Kani, a senior cleric who passed away in 2014 and was among the prominent clerics of the Islamic Republic, including serving as the president of Imam Sadiq University. After studying Islamic teachings and economics at Imam Sadiq University, Bagheri Kani entered governmental institutions in the 1990s. He began his career in the 1990s after a brief period at the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) and started working at the Foreign Ministry. He initially went to the Arab-African department of the Foreign Ministry and worked on relations between the Islamic Republic and countries like Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. In 2007, he served as the Deputy for Europe at the Foreign Ministry for a few months, and in 2008, after Saeed Jalili moved from the Foreign Ministry to the Supreme National Security Council, Bagheri was appointed as his deputy at the council's secretariat. From then until 2013, he was part of Iran's nuclear team during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency and worked alongside Saeed Jalili, the then-secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, in nuclear negotiations. The efforts of the Iranian negotiating team at that time did not lead to any progress in the nuclear talks. In the 2013 presidential election, Bagheri Kani was the head of Saeed Jalili's campaign, and he served as Jalili's deputy in the Supreme National Security Council. In that election, he debated Mahmoud Vaezi, the then-head of office for Hassan Rouhani. While Hassan Rouhani had previously played a role in nuclear negotiations as the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, Jalili was a serious critic of Rouhani's nuclear policy. After Rouhani's victory in that election, Bagheri Kani, like Jalili, quickly became a critic of the government. He criticized the nuclear deal (JCPOA) during and after the negotiations, and despite Khamenei's support for the JCPOA, he claimed, 'In my opinion, the JCPOA was not a leadership decision.' He also wrote a preface to the Persian version of the memoirs of Wendy Sherman, a negotiator of the U.S. nuclear team. In 2017, he stated in a speech, 'Although some have destroyed the nuclear achievements of the Iranian nation with concrete, the blood of nuclear martyrs still flows in the veins of the faithful, creative, and revolutionary youth of Islamic Iran, and no concrete work can take away the enthusiasm for progress from Iranian youth.' Ali Bagheri Kani was appointed in January 2020 by Ibrahim Raisi, the then-head of the judiciary, as the Deputy for International Affairs and the head of the Human Rights Headquarters of the judiciary. The Human Rights Headquarters, established in 2005 during Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi's presidency, acts as the diplomatic apparatus of the judiciary and must respond to reports of human rights violations in Iran in international forums. Ali Bagheri Kani; the emergence of another manager from the family network of Ali Khamenei. Before Bagheri Kani, Mohammad Javad Larijani held the presidency of the Human Rights Headquarters for 14 years and, in this position, rejected numerous reports of human rights violations in Iran while attacking international human rights monitoring bodies. Bagheri Kani followed Larijani's path and explicitly stated in a television program that 'human rights is a confrontational front.' He described Iran's 'aggressive' approach towards the West in the field of human rights in two areas: 'expressing their human rights shortcomings based on their own criteria' and 'presenting human rights achievements and products to the world.' Bagheri Kani was appointed as the political deputy of the Foreign Ministry in September 2021 by Hossein Amirabdollahian, the then-Foreign Minister, replacing Abbas Araghchi, the senior nuclear negotiator in Hassan Rouhani's government. Bagheri Kani's appointment came at a time when European members of the JCPOA, along with the United States, had recently called for the rapid resumption of nuclear negotiations with Iran. As a nuclear negotiator, Bagheri Kani repeatedly claimed that Iran was ready to conclude negotiations in a short time; however, negotiations during Raisi's government did not reach a conclusion for the revival of the JCPOA. Nevertheless, the essence of negotiations between Tehran and Washington did not disappear, and a day before Raisi's death, the Islamic Republic's representation at the United Nations confirmed the holding of indirect negotiations between Iran and the U.S. in Oman. Prior to that, two informed sources told Axios last Friday that two senior officials from the Biden administration had indirectly discussed with Iranian officials in Oman how to prevent the escalation of regional conflicts. Media reports last December indicated that Brett McGurk, along with Abraham Paley, had negotiated with Ali Bagheri Kani, the Deputy Foreign Minister and head of Iran's nuclear negotiations.