Big-5 agree on draft resolution over Iran: IAEA meeting today
VIENNA, Feb 1: The UN Security Council’s five permanent members have agreed on a resolution that asks the UN nuclear watchdog agency to report Iran to the top world body over its nuclear programme, the document’s final text showed.
The resolution asks the International Atomic Energy Agency’s governing board to agree at a crisis meeting on Thursday to ‘convey’ to the council key IAEA reports raising doubts about the nature of Iran’s nuclear work.
It called on Iran to restore confidence in its intentions by re-suspending all nuclear-fuel research and uranium enrichment-related work and implementing transparency measures by halting restrictions on access for IAEA investigators.
“(We) request the (IAEA) Director General to report to the Security Council that these steps are required of Iran by the Board and to report to the Security Council all IAEA reports and resolutions, as adopted, relating to these issues,” it said.
The resolution, to be voted on by the IAEA board’s 35 member states, voiced serious concern the IAEA was not yet able to clarify burning issues in Iran’s atomic project, including the surfacing last year of a document in Tehran that describes how to build the core of a nuclear warhead.
“(We) call on Iran to understand that the board lacks confidence in its intentions in seeking to develop a fissile material production capacity against the background of Iran’s record on safeguards,” the resolution said.
“(We) request Iran to extend full and prompt cooperation to the Agency, which the Director-General deems indispensable and overdue, and in particular to help the Agency clarify possible activities which could have a military dimension,” it said.
The resolution also called on Iran’s parliament to ratify the IAEA’s Additional Protocol, which permits snap inspections of nuclear-related facilities, to resolve concerns about possible ‘undeclared nuclear material and activities’.
RETALIATION: Iran threatened on Wednesday to retaliate if it is hauled before the UN Security Council, by kick-starting sensitive fuel cycle work and blocking international inspections.
In a barrage of threats on the eve of the IAEA meeting, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also vowed Iran would ‘continue on the road to victory’ and labelled US President George Bush a warmonger.
“If Iran’s case is referred or reported to the Security Council... Iran’s cooperation will decrease,” Iran’s top national security official Ali Larijani told a news conference.
“The government will be obliged to remove suspensions, which includes industrial-scale enrichment, and it will do so,” he said, adding that a massive enrichment plant at Natanz in central Iran was “ready for operation”.
“Inspections will be restricted. They will not have the right to go to military sites which we had so far allowed them to go to. Some of their cameras will be taken down,” Larijani said of the now three-year-old IAEA investigation into Iran’s nuclear activities.—Reuters/AFP
