UNITED NATIONS, March 15: The UN Security Council on Tuesday agreed to hold a first formal meeting on the Iranian nuclear crisis on Friday amid continuing wrangling over a draft statement urging Tehran to suspend uranium enrichment.

The council’s five permanent members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — held an informal session with their 10 non-permanent colleagues to discuss elements of a Franco-British draft text on the issue.

Diplomats said council members agreed to meet again informally on Thursday and formally on Friday.

Their meeting followed an informal gathering of the so-called Perm-5 that sought to bridge differences over a proposed council statement on Iran, suspected by the West of seeking a covert nuclear weapons capability.

The text, among other things, calls on Iran to comply with demands set by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), including restoring full and sustained suspension of all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities.

Iran is also asked ‘to take the steps needed to begin building confidence in establishing the exclusively peaceful purpose of its nuclear program’.

The text also calls on IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei to report ‘to the Security Council in 14 days on Iranian compliance with the requirements set out by the IAEA board’.

The draft also presses Iran to promptly ‘ratify and implement in full’ the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty’s (NPT) Additional Protocol, which allows for wider IAEA inspections of a country’s nuclear facilities.

Iran said last month it would suspend the voluntary implementation of Additional Protocol in retaliation for being reported by the IAEA to the Security Council.

Tehran insists that its nuclear program is solely aimed at generating electricity and that it has a right as a signatory to the NPT to conduct uranium enrichment.

“We found a lot of difficulties” with the Franco-British draft, China’s UN delegate Li Junhua said. “Our Russian colleagues made some written suggestions in the same line as our thinking.”

On the 14-day deadline for Mr ElBaradei to report on Iranian compliance, Mr Li said: “We don’t think that setting an artificial deadline would help the diplomatic efforts because we want to maximise all the possible diplomatic efforts.”

Asked when the full council planned to hold its first formal session on the crisis since it received an assessment report from Mr ElBaradei last Wednesday, Peru’s UN envoy Oswaldo de Rivero said: “Friday”.

De Rivero stressed however that any council decision on the draft statement would not take place ‘before next week’.

“We had a very good meeting. We discussed the elements that France and the UK put down,” Britain’s UN envoy Emyr Jones Parry said. “These are now being referred to capitals and I expect we will have an early meeting later this week to see what the reactions are with a view to making progress on the text.”—AFP