TEHRAN- Late on Tuesday, Tehran strongly criticized the Group of Seven industrialized states' anti-Iran statement as baseless, one-sided, and unfair. The statement was released during a gathering of the group's seven members on Tuesday in Germany.

The group includes Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States.The group criticized Iran's “ballistic missile activity,” advocated “limitation of Iran's nuclear program,” and charged Iran with “human rights breaches.”Later in the day, Nasser Kanani, the spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, stated that the Islamic Republic strongly opposes the issuance of such a statement.The statement, he said, “deliberately ignores” the United States' withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran and other pacts, as well as Washington's subsequent re-imposition of unlawful sanctions against the Iranian people. The Foreign Ministry official chastised the countries that had made the statement for their complicity in the imposition of sanctions by the U.S.

and their failure to resist the coercive economic measures.Additionally, he rejected any criticism of Iran's peaceful nuclear energy program, saying the statement “deliberately” ignores the Islamic Republic’s ban on all nuclear weapons.Kanani emphasized that the G7 countries were making "factitious accusations" against Iran while having the world’s “biggest nuclear arsenal.”The spokesperson denounced the statement for attempting to cast doubt on Iran's extensive collaboration with the International Atomic Energy Agency.He went on to deny any allegations against Iran's "legitimate and defensive missile program," reiterating that the country's missile development will never be open to compromise.“It is necessary that the parties that have issued the statement rather be accountable for their sales of billions of dollars of advanced weapons, which is one of the most important factors of instability in our region,” Kanani remarked. In response to the claims made on human rights in the statement, the official said that the nations making the accusations were the very same ones that had turned a blind eye to the "flagrant violation" of the rights of the Iranian people as a result of the sanctions.