UN’s nuclear watchdog has asked the UN Security Council to hold Iran accountable
The UN’s nuclear watchdog has asked the UN Security Council to hold Iran accountable for its failure to comply with safeguards designed to prevent the development of nuclear weapons, diplomatic officials said Wednesday.
The board referred Iran to the Council for the first time in 20 years, citing Tehran’s failure to cooperate with a long-running investigation into uranium traces detected by inspectors at undeclared sites.
These have included disabling monitoring cameras and subjecting inspectors to “excessively invasive physical searches”, according to former officials, diplomats and more than a decade of UN documents, as cited by CNN. IAEA officials have said the inspection gap has disrupted the agency’s “continuity of knowledge” about Iran’s uranium, enrichment centrifuges and other monitored nuclear materials, leaving it unable to verify their status, quantity or location. But in the years after US President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal, Iran gradually and systematically breached its nuclear safeguards, according to contemporaneous IAEA reports.
It is the latest chapter in a more than decade-long effort to monitor Iran, during which the country has moved from compliance to obstructing inspection efforts.