VIENNA — The
US, Britain, France and Germany have submitted
a motion to the UN atomic energy watchdog to censure Iran over its lack of
cooperation with the agency, two diplomats said Tuesday.
اضافة اعلان
“The text was submitted overnight” from Monday to
Tuesday, a
European diplomat told AFP. A second diplomat confirmed the news.
The resolution urging Iran to cooperate fully with
the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) marks the first time since June
2020 when a similar motion censuring Iran was adopted.
It is a sign of growing Western impatience after
talks to revive the 2015 landmark nuclear accord with Iran stalled in March.
The vote is likely to happen on Thursday during the
week-long meeting of the IAEA’s 35-member Board of Governors, one of the
diplomats 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 Iran had not declared as having hosted
nuclear activities.
IAEA head
Rafael Grossi told reporters on Monday
after opening the board meeting that he hoped “to solve these things once and
for all”.
The negotiations to revive the accord started in
April 2021 with the aim of bringing the US back into the deal, lifting
sanctions and getting Iran to scale back its stepped-up nuclear program.
The deal — promising Tehran sanctions relief in
exchange for curbs in its nuclear program — started to fall apart in 2018 when
the then US president Donald Trump withdrew from it.
Iranian foreign ministry spokesman
Saeed Khatibzadeh told state TV on Monday that Iran would reject the resolution, saying it would
have “a negative impact both on the general direction of our cooperation with
the IAEA and on our negotiations”.
China and Russia — who with Britain, France and
Germany are parties to the Iran nuclear deal — have warned that any resolution
could disrupt the negotiation process.
“Russia will not associate itself with such a
resolution,” Russia’s ambassador to the UN in Vienna,
Mikhail Ulyanov, said in
a tweet late Monday.
Analysts say the high stakes negotiations are unlikely to
fall apart because of the resolution.
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