AKIPRESS.COM - Foreign ministers are due to reconvene in Lausanne on Thursday morning to consider new Iranian proposals aimed at bringing an end to the impasse that has mired negotiations over the the country’s nuclear programme, reports The Guardian.

No details were released about the proposals but an Iranian official had publicly hinted at new flexibility over one of the most intractable issues, the lifting of UN sanctions.

As the talks continued until dawn on Thursday, the US state department announced that secretary of state John Kerry was postponing his departure and would remain until at least Thursday morning.

At around 6am local time on Thursday, department spokeswoman Marie Harf tweeted that the talks had broken after an all-night session but would resume in a few hours.

According to the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the Iranian delegation was asked to present any changes in its position formally at a meeting of foreign ministers and diplomats from a six-nation group involved in the negotiations.

“There will be new proposals tonight,” Steinmeier said late on Wednesday. “I can’t predict whether that will be sufficient to reach an agreement in the course of the night. Accuracy is more important than speed. I am of the opinion that a success is still possible.”

The talks are entering their second day after a deadline for arriving at a framework agreement. Asked if he thought it possible the negotiations could collapse Steinmeier said: “Of course.”

The talks have been stuck for days over differences in demands on the amount of development work Iran would be permitted to carry out on new centrifuges, capable of enriching uranium much faster than the existing Iranian model.

A further obstacle has been a disagreement over how quickly UN sanctions should be lifted. While the Iranian delegation has so far insisted they are all cancelled at once, as soon as an agreement is signed, the country’s deputy foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, suggested on Wednesday that Tehran might accept sanctions relief in stages.

“Sanctions have originated from various points and we are insisting that in the first step, all economic, banking and oil sanctions must be lifted and other sanctions that are related to other issues should also be determined in a timetable,” Araqchi said. “Unless we have a clear view of what will happen to those sanctions, we can’t go forward.”