Amano’s May 24th Report to the IAEA BOG on Iran

Readers may have seen reports in the media about IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano’s most recent report to the IAEA Board of Governors on Iran. Jonathan Tirone has a good one here, as usual.  Although the BOG report itself is restricted distribution, once again in the interests of transparency a Vienna source has provided a copy of the report to Arms Control Law for public dissemination.  You can find it at the link below.

Generally speaking, this report is consistent with the other recent DG reports on Iran’s compliance with the terms of the JCPOA and the IAEA’s monitoring and verification activities pursuant to Iran’s comprehensive safeguards agreement and its additional protocol agreement, which Iran is provisionally applying according to the terms of the JCPOA.

This report, as previous reports have done, finds Iran in compliance with its various safeguards commitments and with the terms of the JCPOA.  It’s worth reiterating in that context some of the facts of the IAEA’s extensive and really unprecedented monitoring activities in Iran, as the IAEA itself reported in its 2017 Safeguards Implementation Report which I recently posted here.

In 2017, the IAEA conducted 419 safeguards inspections in Iran.  This is far and away more than in any other safeguarded state.  Added to this, the IAEA conducted a total of 35 complementary access inspections in Iran, pursuant to the terms of Iran’s additional protocol agreement. These are sometimes referred to as “snap” inspections because of the shorter notice period given to the state prior to the inspection.  These complementary access inspections can also be requested at a broader range of sites than normal inspections under the comprehensive safeguards agreement.  Again, the number of complementary access inspections conducted by the IAEA in Iran in 2017 was significantly higher than in any other state.

Back in March, Amano said that the IAEA “has the world’s most robust verification regime in place in Iran” and has access to “all the locations” that it needs within Iran.

So it is a bit surprising that in this most recent Iran report to the BOG, while again confirming Iran’s compliance with the terms of both the JCPOA and its safeguards agreements, Amano chose to editorialize by saying:

The Agency has continued to evaluate Iran’s declarations under the Additional Protocol, and has conducted complementary accesses under the Additional Protocol to all the sites and locations in Iran which it needed to visit. Timely and proactive cooperation by Iran in providing such access would facilitate implementation of the Additional Protocol and enhance confidence.

Timely and proactive cooperation? The 419 completed inspections and 35 granted complementary access requests weren’t good enough for you? Geesh.  There’s just no pleasing some people!

It’s pretty obvious what the motivation for this superfluous editorializing was. It was almost certainly to throw a bone to the state that brought Amano to the DG dance in the first place, and then got him his second and now third terms in the job. Remember those Wikileaks docs on the “cozy” relationship between Amano and the U.S. delegation to the IAEA?  Well this appears to be him doing his part by inserting this unnecessary language that allows the Trump administration to have a small but useful negative talking point about the IAEA report.

IAEA BOG Iran Report May 2018.