By Daisy Ayliffe - 13th January 2006
Foreign ministers from France, Germany and Britain said EU efforts to negotiate with Iran over its nuclear ambitions had come to a “dead end” on Thursday.
Foreign ministers met in Berlin to respond to Tehran’s decision to resume nuclear research.
The EU3 said an extraordinary meeting of the board of governors of the IAEA would now be convened “with a view to referring the issue to the [UN] security council.”
The security council
The US, Britain and France, three of the security council's five permanent members, will have little problem in securing a majority for action at the UN security council.
A blocking move by Russia or China, the two other permanent members with a veto is perhaps the only way Iran could escape censure.
At a board meeting of the IAEA in September on a resolution on Iran Russia and China both abstained from voting.
But more recently China has called for Iran to return to talks and Russia has urged Tehran to freeze its activities.
US welcome
Europe’s decision to refer Iran to the security has been welcomed across the Atlantic.
US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice said the Iranians had crossed a threshold by their "dangerous defiance of the entire international community."
"What the Iranians did was to unilaterally destroy the basis on which the negotiations were taking place…they unilaterally basically blew up the negotiations," Rice told reporters.
UN reticence
But UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Tehran should only be threatened with the security council once all other possibilities are exhausted.
“First of all, I think we should try and resolve it if possible in the IAEA context,” Annan told reporters on Thursday.
And the IAEA agrees that it needs more time to make up its mind about Iran.
“People say this smells like a nuclear weapons programme but I cannot work on the basis of intention. Our due process is more thorough than that,” IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei told journalists.
“I’m not ready to jump the gun. These are judgments that make the difference between war and peace.”
The Iranian position
Iran asserts that it has a right, under article four of the NPT, to pursue peaceful nuclear technologies, including uranium enrichment.
But whilst this may be guaranteed by the NPT, the west says Iran’s past pursuit of secret facilities proves it cannot be trusted with nuclear power.
"We can't trust the Iranians when it comes to enriching uranium…they should not be allowed to enrich uranium," US President George W Bush said in April.
In September last year Iran decided to temporarily suspend its nuclear enrichment program – as a measure of good faith.
But now Tehran says it needs to recommence research in order to meet electricity needs.
Many Iranians feel they are being bullied by western hypocrites who have their own nuclear programmes.
And although President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have attracted criticism for his aggressive international rhetoric in recent weeks, on the nuclear issues most Iranians appear to be behind him.
"Some of them lately have even gone so far as to say that the Iranian nation has no right to conduct nuclear research. All nations should know that if we give these bullies a chance, they will next say that you don't have the right to have universities," Ahmadinejad told cheering crowds last week.
"The Iranian nation and government will defend the right to nuclear research and technology and will go forward prudently," he added.
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