French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian has said that his country intends to stay in the Iran nuclear deal.

"We are stakeholders in the Vienna agreement and we are going to stay stakeholders,” Le Drian told reporters in Dublin on Sunday.

“We think that the fight against nuclear non-proliferation is important and this agreement means that nuclear non-proliferation is possible because Iran will not go all the way to [build] nuclear weapons,” he added.

On May 8, US President Donald Trump announced that the US was walking away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) which he described as a horrible deal.

Trump also said he would reinstate US nuclear sanctions on Iran and impose "the highest level" of economic bans on the Islamic Republic.

Iran has said it would remain in the JCPOA for now, pending negotiations with the other signatories in the coming weeks before making a final decision on its future role in the agreement.

Earlier, Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani stressed that the European Union’s time to preserve the nuclear deal is limited.

The JCPOA came out of years of negotiations between Iran on one side and the P5+1 group of countries -- the US, UK, France, Russia and China plus Germany -- on the other, in July 2015.

The JCPOA went into effect in January 2016. The IAEA has since confirmed Iran’s full compliance in numerous quarterly reports.

Washington’s five other partners in the deal have already taken turns to denounce Trump’s attack on the multilateral Iran deal, vowing that they would stick to their commitments under the accord despite the US withdrawal.