European Parliament President Martin Schulz has postponed a planned trip to Iran, officially for ‘’agenda reasons.’’ The visit was aimed at improving relations between Iran and the EU following the signing in July of a deal between world powers and Tehran regarding its nuclear program. “Due to agenda reasons, my visit to #Iran foreseen for tomorrow has been postponed to a later date,” Schulz tweeted. Last week, in a letter, 115 members of the European Parliament urged Schulz to use the occasion of this visit ‘’to publicly denounce human rights abuses in Iran’’ and call ‘’for ending public executions.’’ ‘’It is regrettable that while the EU and the world powers were negotiating over a nuclear deal with Iran, the government of the ‘moderate’ President Hassan Rouhani was busy hanging hundreds of its citizens, many of them in public,’’ the MEPs wrote. They also suggested him to meet with several prisoners of conscience. Amnesty International has released a report that 700 executions took place in Iran only during the first six months of this year. “Iran’s staggering execution toll for the first half of this year paints a sinister picture of the machinery of the state carrying out premeditated, judicially-sanctioned killings on a mass scale,” it said. ‘’While Iran is boasting about improved ties with the west, the European Parliament which represents half a billion European citizens with common democratic values has a duty to put human rights as a top priority for any expansion of relationship with this regime, setting an example for our EU governments,’’ the MEPs said.

Meanwhile, EU foreign policy Federica Mogherini received this week in Brussels an Iranian delegation led by the Deputy Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian.

According to a statement from the EU’s External Service, she first welcomed the completion of the Iranian parliamentary process on the nuclear deal. Mogherini had coordinated the nuclear diplomacy with Iran on behalf of the six powers.

The Council gave the mandate to the EU’s High Representative ‘’to explore ways in which the EU could promote a more constructive regional framework in the Middle East.’’ In light of this, Mogherini focused the discussion on Syria.

The statement said that the three-hour discussions were followed by senior official talks which focused on the need to advance in parallel the fight against Da'esh and a political process that would bring the conflict inside Syria to an end, starting with a de-escalation of the current tensions.

The discussions reiterated the need to actively support the process led by the UN Special Envoy, Staffan de Mistura, and the need to continue to work together on this path.

German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier is due to travel to Iran and Saudi Arabia at the end of this week to push for a political solution in the Syria conflict. Riyadh is one of the strongest opponents of al-Assad.

"We need the regional actors and, here, we are encountering hurdles laying in the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia," Steinmeier said Monday on the margins of an EU Foreign Ministers' meeting in Luxembourg.