VIENNA, June 17: The UN atomic agency on Friday set up a special committee to deal with difficult verification problems such as investigating Iran’s nuclear programme, a move US President George W. Bush had suggested last year.
“They adopted it by consensus,” a diplomat told AFP of the setting up of an “advisory committee on safeguards and verification”.
US ambassador Jackie Sanders told reporters: “The proliferation challenges of today, including non-compliance by North Korea and Iran and the revelation of nuclear (international smuggling) procurement networks, call for more evolution. The new committee should play a key role in helping us meet these challenges.”
The United States charges that Iran is using a civilian nuclear programme, which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has been investigating for over two years, to probe the development of nuclear weapons.
Mr Bush had called in a speech in February 2004 for the IAEA, which verifies compliance with the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, to be strengthened.
He had wanted only “governments in good standing with the IAEA” and not “under investigation for proliferation violations” such as Iran to be able to serve on the committee but had to yield on this as non-aligned states feared the committee would be a US vehicle to control the IAEA’s verification tasks, diplomats said.
“The original US proposal has been completely overhauled,” a non-aligned diplomat told AFP.
The diplomat said the committee will be an advisory rather than a standing body, with a limited two-year mandate and open to all members of the IAEA’s 35-nation board of governors, on which Iran served last year in a regular rotation.
“It doesn’t in any way undermine the board,” the diplomat said.
The diplomat said the “Americans moved tremendously to meet the preoccupations of the memberships of the board.”
The confidential US proposal, a copy of which was obtained by AFP, calls on the IAEA board “to set up a committee on safeguards and verification to consider ways and means to strengthen the safeguards system and to report thereon, with recommendations to the board of governors.”
The United States has moved to defuse tensions with the IAEA, which Washington charges is soft on Iran, since Condoleezza Rice took office as US Secretary of State, dropping opposition to ElBaradei serving a third four-year term as IAEA chief.
The board re-elected ElBaradei on Monday.
The board was wrapping up Friday the week-long meeting at its headquarters in Vienna that had sharply criticized Iran for still dragging its feet in helping the IAEA investigation, which has already discovered almost two decades of hidden Iranian nuclear activity.
IAEA deputy director for safeguards Pierre Goldschmidt told the board Thursday that the IAEA has now discovered that Iran had failed to report it was carrying out experiments on plutonium, a potential atom bomb material, as late as 1998.—AFP
