Brussels, 16/02/2005 (Agence Europe) - At the end of Tuesday's meeting in Budapest between the president of the European Council, Jean-Claude Juncker and the Iranian Foreign Affairs Minister, Kamal Kharazi, the EU and Iran made two separate declarations explaining their wishes to reach an agreement on Tehran's nuclear programme. Mr Juncker said that the EU was in a position to “be able to convince Iran through the channel of negotiations over the next few weeks, to stop making nuclear weapons …We are trying to persuade the Iranians of giving up on the possibility of having access to nuclear weapons but not to give up their civilian nuclear ambitions”. Reaffirming that Iran was not “conducting any nuclear weapons manufacturing programme”, Mr Kharazi stressed his hope that negotiations would lead to a “fruitful result”. Kharzai said that the key to the negotiations would be finding a “mechanism” that assured Europeans that Iran was not seeking to develop a nuclear weapon. Mr Kharazi then travelled to Luxembourg on Tuesday afternoon where he met his Luxembourg counterpart, Jean Asselborn, to discuss negotiations to be held in Geneva behind closed doors on 8-11 February (EUROPE 15 February p 7). At the end of this third series of negotiations between European and Iranian experts since the Paris agreement of 15 November where Tehran agreed to meet mid-March in Geneva for a new round of negotiations behind closed doors. A “pilot committee” consisting of EU3 foreign affairs ministers, Iranian Negotiator-in-Chief, Hassan Rossani, and the EU High Representative for CFSP, Javier Solana, will meet at the end of March to look at negotiation developments. Last Sunday, however, Tehran turned down European offers made at Geneva on technological cooperation that would have allowed Iran a light water reactor. The Europeans believe that a light water reactor would present less risk of being used in military applications than a heavy water reactor, which Tehran is seeking.