2015 IAEA Safeguards Implementation Report

Another thing I’ve been meaning to do for a while is to post the 2015 IAEA Safeguards Implementation Report, which I received from a party in Vienna in the interests of transparency. See the link to the 2015 SIR below.

SIRs make for very interesting reading about how the IAEA assesses the compliance of sates with their safeguards obligations.

With regard to Iran, it seems to me that the 2015 SIR is still making the mistakes of previous years’ SIRs. The way the IAEA has singled out Iran for the discriminatory application of compliance standards is summed up nicely by these two summary paragraphs on Page 1:

Safeguards activities were implemented for 52 States with comprehensive safeguards
agreements in force, but without additional protocols in force. For these States, the Secretariat found no indication of the diversion of declared nuclear material from peaceful nuclear activities. On this basis, the Secretariat concluded that, for these States, declared nuclear material remained in peaceful activities.

While the Secretariat concluded that, for 2015, declared nuclear material in Iran remained in peaceful activities, it was unable to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran was in peaceful activities.

I provide a full discussion of the IAEA’s erroneous application of compliance standards to Iran in Chapter 5 of my new book which you can find here on my SSRN page.

Hopefully we’ll start to see some changes in the language used in the SIR regarding Iran in the 2016 edition.

iaea-2015-sir