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Iran
Rafael Grossi, Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), opens the IAEA's Board of Governors meeting at the agency's headquarters in Vienna, Austria on September 12, 2022. Photo: Joe Klamar/AFP
ERBIL, Kurdistan Region - The United Nations’ nuclear agency’s information gap on Iran’s nuclear activities is getting bigger as the agency’s clarification process with Tehran has not borne any fruit, the agency’s chief told reporters on Monday.
“The clarification process that we are trying to conduct with Iran has not borne fruit so far, we are still expecting this to happen,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi told reporters. “Frankly, the information gap is bigger and bigger.”
Grossi’s statement came after a Wednesday report from the agency said that they were "not in a position to provide assurance that Iran's nuclear programme is exclusively peaceful".
Tehran dismissed the report as “baseless” on Thursay, but according to Grossi, “it is not new to see that when the agency is demanding certain things and Iran does not want to or does not engage in the way one would expect”.
Iran's foreign ministry spokesman Nasser Kanaani on Monday said that Tehran was ""ready to cooperate with the agency to clear up the false and unrealistic perceptions regarding its peaceful nuclear activities."
Following the report from the IAEA, the UK, France, and Germany criticized Iran on Saturday, saying that Tehran “continues to escalate its nuclear program way beyond any plausible civilian justification.”
Iran soon slammed the statement from the European superpowers, labeling it as “deviant”.
The IAEA’s concerns comes as over a year of talks between Iran and western super powers in Vienna to bring Tehran back to full compliance with the landmark nuclear deal is yet to bear fruit.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) was signed between Britain, China, France, Germany, Iran, Russia, and the United States in 2015, offering Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear program that it rapidly advanced following former US president Donald Trump's unilateral withdrawal from the deal in 2018, sparking concerns that Iran is seeking to develop an atomic bomb.
However Iran has on several occasions said that their nuclear program only serves a peaceful purpose.
Last month, the EU put forward what it labeled as the final text to restore the 2015 agreement, and despite everyone claiming that a final deal was closer than ever, the joint statement on Saturday said that given Iran’s failure to conclude the deal on the table, the European powers “will consult, alongside international partners, on how best to address Iran’s continued nuclear escalation and lack of cooperation with the IAEA.
In response to the claim by Iran that the decisions made by the IAEA are politicized, Grossi said that the issue with the country is very straightforward.
“We found traces of uranium in places that were never declared and were never supposed to have any nuclear activity, and we are asking questions,” he said.
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