N talks: Tehran faces censure
Tuesday, 7 June 2022
VIENNA, June 06 (AFP): Major European countries and the United States are expected to seek to censure Iran as the UN atomic watchdog started meeting on Monday amid stalled talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal.
The resolution drafted by the United States, Britain, France and Germany is a sign of their growing impatience as diplomats warn the window to save the landmark deal is closing.
The International Atomic Energy Agency's Board of Governors meets Monday through Friday in Vienna.
If the resolution urging Iran to "cooperate fully" with the IAEA is adopted, it will be the first motion censuring Iran since June 2020.
Talks to revive the accord started in April 2021 with the aim of bringing the United States back into the deal and lift sanctions again, and get Iran to scale back its stepped-up nuclear programme.
The 2015 landmark deal-promising Tehran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs in its nuclear programme-started to fall apart in 2018 when then US president Donald Trump withdrew from it.
Talks to revive the agreement have stalled in recent months.
The coordinator of the talks, the EU's top diplomat Josep Borrell, warned in a tweet this weekend that the possibility of returning to the accord was "shrinking".
"But we still can do it with an extra effort," he said.
In a report late last month, the IAEA said it still had questions that were "not clarified" regarding traces of enriched uranium previously found at three sites which had not been declared by Iran as having hosted nuclear activities.
Iran has warned "any political action" by the United States and the so-called E3 group of France, Germany and the UK would "provoke without any doubt a proportional, effective and immediate response".
"Those who push for anti-Iran resolution at IAEA will be responsible for all the consequences," Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian tweeted on Sunday.
Kelsey Davenport, an expert with the Arms Control Association, told AFP a resolution was "necessary to send a message that there are consequences for stonewalling the agency and failing to meet safeguards obligations". "There is no excuse for Iran's continued failure to provide meaningful cooperation with the agency's investigation," she said.