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Iran Case Could Lead to Nonconsensus IAEA Action By Joe Fiorill WASHINGTON — Faced with a stalemate over Iran’s nuclear programs, the International Atomic Energy Agency board could next week take the unusual step of making a decision by vote, rather than consensus, experts said yesterday (see GSN, Sept. 13). After many months of alternating progress and setbacks in talks between Iran and the European Union troika of France, Germany and the United Kingdom, Tehran has resumed controversial nuclear activities. The EU countries, meanwhile, are set to support a long-standing U.S. push to have the IAEA Board of Governors refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council. “We are pushing very hard for the thing to be taken to the Security Council, and I guess the EU-3 are kind of up to their eyeballs in agony right now,” former top U.S. nonproliferation official Lawrence Scheinman said yesterday in an interview. At IAEA board meetings over the past two years, countries have issued consensus statements on Iran that fell short of U.S. goals while calling Tehran to task over ambiguities in its nuclear intentions. Supporters and opponents of a Security Council referral are now claiming similar levels of support — about 14 countries each — among the 35 countries that make up the board, which begins a weeklong meeting Monday in Vienna. Amid increasing Western concern about Iran’s programs and with no end in sight to the stalemate, the board may be about to abandon its typical insistence on unanimity or near-unanimity. “This will be a departure from that,” Council on Foreign Relations Middle East expert Ray Takeyh told reporters in a conference call yesterday. He predicted the board would reach a decision by just a slim majority. Board rules allow for a two-thirds majority vote on some matters and for a simple majority vote in other cases. Under the IAEA statute, “Decisions on the amount of the agency's budget shall be made by a two-thirds majority of those present and voting. … Decisions on other questions, including the determination of additional questions or categories of questions to be decided by a two-thirds majority, shall be made by a majority of those present and voting.” Council on Foreign Relations nuclear expert Charles Ferguson, a former U.S. nonproliferation official, said during the conference call that the board could engage next week in a complicated series of maneuvers to make use of those rules. For example, he said, the panel could take an initial simple-majority vote to suspend the two-thirds-majority rule, then a second simple-majority vote on Iran that would be based on that suspension. World Nuclear Association Director General John Ritch, a former U.S. envoy in Vienna, said in an interview yesterday that a vote would be a mistake. “Applying the voting procedures that the rules provide for would be technically permissible but highly damaging to the fabric that holds the agency together,” Ritch said. “The principle of building consensus in the Board of Governors is what has enabled the IAEA to be a highly successful forum for the maintenance of a highly successful nonproliferation regime.” “I cannot imagine,” he added, “that the Bush administration would be so foolish as to exercise its full rights under the rules. A victory, even if won, would be a very short-lived success.” Scheinman, now at the Washington office of the Monterey Institute of International Studies’ Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said the rules are open to interpretation and that their potential uses are difficult to predict. “It gets complicated,” he said. “I could imagine a vote to refer the case to the Security Council,” Scheinman added, “at which point I’m reasonably certain nothing could happen” because of the presence on the council of Iran supporters Russia and China. “On the other hand,” he said, “you don’t know what the Iranians are going to do. How do they react to this?” Tehran might, for example, counterattack by denying oil to countries that voted against it, he said. Under new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran is looking eastward for economic and political support and taking a harder line with the West, Takeyh said (see GSN, June 20). “They’re not going to make extraordinary, beyond-NPT [Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty] concessions to sustain that dynamic” of relations with EU countries or the United States, Takeyh said. “It is a government that’s actually indifferent to relations with the United States.” Ahmadinejad is slated to address the U.N. General Assembly today on Iran’s nuclear programs. Takeyh predicted he would emphasize the right of poor countries to pursue nuclear energy capabilities under the treaty. “I think it’s going to be couched in North-South terms,” he said. Scheinman added that Iran’s position on its nuclear rights is correct under the treaty. “I hate to say it, but they’re backed up by the NPT,” he said. “It’s a losing proposition to try to take the case that there is no inalienable right. That’s in the treaty.”
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