A draft resolution European powers submitted to the UN nuclear watchdog's Board of Governors on June 3 for a vote this week presses Iran again to explain uranium traces found at undeclared sites and also covers issues such as its barring of inspectors, Report informs referring to Reuters.
The text seen by Reuters follows a resolution passed 18 months ago ordering Tehran to urgently comply with a years-long International Atomic Energy Agency investigation into those traces. The new text calls on Iran to cooperate without delay, including by letting the IAEA take samples if the agency needs to.
It also goes further, addressing problems that have arisen more recently, such as Iran's barring of many of the IAEA's top uranium-enrichment experts on the inspection team. It calls on Iran to reverse that step and implement a March 2023 joint statement that the IAEA saw as a sweeping pledge of cooperation.
"(The Board) Calls on Iran to provide sufficient cooperation with the Agency and take the essential and urgent actions as decided by the Board in its November 2022 resolution, to resolve safeguards issues which remain outstanding despite numerous interactions with the Agency since 2019," the text said.
The 35-nation Board of Governors meets quarterly and is one of the IAEA's two top policy-making bodies. The other meets only once a year.
Since that 2022 resolution the number of sites being investigated over the traces has been narrowed to two from three but Iran still has not explained how the traces got there. The IAEA refers to that as "outstanding safeguards issues".