No justification for Security Council move, says Iran
Iran’s vice president said today the decision to send Iran’s case to the UN Security Council has no legal justification.
At a London meeting that lasted into the early hours of today, envoys of Britain, China, France, Russia and the US decided to call on the International Atomic Energy Agency to report Iran to the UN Security Council.
But they also decided that the Security Council should wait until March to take up Iranian nuclear file after a formal report on Tehran’s activities from the atomic agency.
Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh, who also runs Iran’s Atomic Energy Organisation, said it was difficult to predict how the IAEA meeting on Thursday would develop, the semi-official Iranian Students News Agency reported.
“The biggest problem for the West is that they can’t find any (legal) justification to refer Iran to the UN Security Council,” ISNA quoted him as saying.
Iranian Foreign Ministry officials could not be reached for comment today, but the government is expected to be extremely displeased by the decision.
Last week the government sent Iran’s top nuclear negotiator, Ali Larijani, to Moscow and Beijing to seek Russian and Chinese support against the Western drive to refer Iran to the Security Council.
The US accuses Iran of trying to build atomic weapons. Iran denies this, saying its nuclear programme is only for generating electricity.
Iranian radio and television did not promptly broadcast the referral decision, although the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported it. Television broadcast comments by Iran’s deputy nuke negotiator, Javad Vaedi, about his talks with European envoys in Brussels yesterday, but did not mention the decision to refer Iran to the Security Council.
Iran broke IAEA seals at a uranium enrichment plant on January 10 and resumed small-scale enrichment. The decision provoked an outcry and Britain, France and Germany, who had been negotiating with Iran, said they would press the IAEA to refer the matter to the Security Council.
In last-ditch talks yesterday, representatives of the European powers met Iran’s Vaedi in Brussels but reported that they failed to make progress.
