GENEVA
U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and his Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif met in Geneva on Wednesday ahead of nuclear talks in a bid to "speed up the process."
"I think it's important. I think it will show the readiness of the two parties to move forward and to speed up the process," Zarif told reporters before he met Kerry.
Nuclear talks with the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - the U.S., U.K., China, France and Russia, also known as the P5+1 group, will start on Jan. 15 in Geneva.
Iranian delegations will hold bilateral talks both with U.S. delegations and the P5+1 group ahead of multilateral talks on Jan. 18.
The meeting, which took place behind closed doors and was supposed to finish at 6:00 p.m. (1700GMT), is still ongoing.
Both sides have already missed two deadlines for a permanent settlement on Iran's nuclear program.
Negotiations in the Austrian capital, Vienna, on Nov. 24, 2014 were supposed to be the final round of talks between Iran and the group of world powers.
However, the deadline for a permanent settlement with Iran was extended till the end of June 2015.
The P5+1 group claim Iran could be seeking to develop nuclear weapons and want it to curb its nuclear program in return for the lifting of sanctions, despite the fact that a declassified summary of the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate found in 2007 with "high confidence" that the Islamic republic had stopped efforts to develop nuclear weapons in late 2003.
- Charlie Hebdo 'disrespects sanctities'
Zarif also said that Charlie Hebdo's latest cover of a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad "disrespects sanctities" and making " a serious dialogue" harder.
"In a world of different views and differing cultures and civilizations we won't be able to engage in a serious dialogue if we start disrespecting each other's values and sanctities," he added.
French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo released its first issue on Wednesday since the brutal attack on its offices that killed 12 people last week, with a new cartoon showing the Prophet Muhammad on the cover.
