VIENNA, Sept 9 (Reuters) – The U.N. nuclear watchdog’s 35-nation board of governors has passed a resolution reporting Iran to the U.N. Security Council for the first time in 20 years for breaching its non-proliferation obligations, diplomats said on Wednesday.
The resolution follows up on a previous one passed on June 12 last year — the day before Israel started bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities, soon followed by the United States — that found Iran in “non-compliance” with those obligations. Reporting it to the council for that breach required another resolution.
While the Security Council is unlikely to take concrete action against Iran since its allies Russia and China are permanent, veto-wielding members, the move is an escalation in a diplomatic standoff between Iran and Western powers, and Iran warned on Monday it would retaliate if the resolution passed.
The text, proposed by the United States, Britain, France and Germany, passed with 23 votes in favour, three against and eight abstentions, diplomats at the closed-door International Atomic Energy Agency meeting said. The countries that opposed were Russia, China and Niger, they said.
“(The board) requests the (IAEA) Director General to report this resolution and the previously adopted resolutions … to all Members of the Agency and to the Security Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations, in accordance with the relevant provisions of the IAEA Statute,” the text read.
While the finding of non-compliance predates the war between the United States and Iran and concerns Iran’s failure to explain uranium traces found at undeclared sites that the agency spent years investigating, there is now another standoff over IAEA access to the sites bombed by Israel and the United States.
(Reporting by Francois Murphy. Editing by Mark Potter and Ros Russell)
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