UN watchdog meets to talk about Iran, Syria

The UN atomic watchdog began a two-day meeting here on Thursday, where Iran's disputed nuclear drive was expected to top the agenda, alongside Syria and a US proposal for an international nuclear fuel bank.

Originally scheduled to convene at 10.30am (0930 GMT), the International Atomic Energy Agency's 35-member board of governors sat down half an hour earlier due to expectations of a long and perhaps heated debate over the Iran dossier.

The IAEA meet comes just three days before much higher-level talks in Geneva where Iran is to sit down with the so-called P5+1 grouping of Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States plus Germany for the first time in over a year.

Diplomats attending the closed-door assembly at the IAEA's headquarters in Vienna said a large number of member states had asked to make statements to the board after the agency's latest Iran report showed no progress on the long-running investigation into the Islamic republic's atomic programme.

After eight years of intensive probing, the watchdog is still not in a position to say whether the activities are entirely peaceful as Tehran claims or whether it masks a covert drive to build a bomb as western powers believe.

The latest report, circulated to IAEA member states last week, found that Iran was defying UN Security Council resolutions and pressing ahead with uranium enrichment, even if the activities appeared to have run into some sort of technical problems recently.
 

Follow Emirates 24|7 on Google News.