UN turns up pressure on Iran’s nuclear activities

Iran was under diplomatic pressure on Friday after a UN watchdog report said it had expanded its nuclear programme and was hampering inspections, and UN chief Ban Ki-moon in Tehran called on it to release political prisoners.
Iranian officials responded by denying some of the charges in the International Atomic Energy Agency report, which they said was timed to steal the spotlight from a Non-Aligned Movement summit they were hosting.
Ban’s appeal for the release of “opposition leaders, human rights defenders, journalists and social activists,” made in a speech to an Iranian diplomatic college on Thursday, went without any immediate official response from Tehran.
Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei opened the two-day NAM summit with a speech on Thursday railing against the United States, Israel and the UN Security Council, which are at the forefront of the pressure directed at his country.
He said Iran would “never” cease its nuclear energy activities, regardless of UN and Western sanctions, and insisted that the programme was not aimed at developing nuclear weapons, whose use he called an “unforgiveable sin.”
The IAEA report was released late on Thursday — in the middle of the summit — and said Iran had doubled its capacity to enrich uranium at its underground Fordo nuclear facility by installing, but not yet switching on, more than 1,000 more centrifuges.
It also said that UN inspectors wanting to see part of a military base in Parchin, outside Tehran, which is suspected of hosting tests of explosives that could be used in a nuclear warhead, had been “significantly hampered” by months of refused access.
It said there had also been what looked like intensive scrubbing and scraping at the facility, and the use of covers to shield the site from satellite cameras.
Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi rejected the Parchin allegations, telling the ISNA news agency they had “no technical basis” and that “one cannot clean a site” of nuclear work.
A member of the Iranian parliament’s national security and foreign policy committee, Hossein Naqavi Hosseini, said the timing of the report was “politically motivated” with the aim of “undermining the summit.”
Iran’s uranium enrichment, and its Fordo bunker, were two of the key points raised in negotiations this year by the P5+1 — the UN Security Council’s five permanent members plus Germany — that have all but stalled.
EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, representing the P5+1, is to talk with Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili “in the coming days,” Ashton’s spokesman said on Thursday.
Iranian officials have previously emphasised that Parchin is an off-limits military base and that the IAEA’s focus on it is overblown and based on “false” Western intelligence.
Ban, in his speech at the Iranian diplomats’ college, expanded on criticism of Iran’s nuclear stand that he had delivered in meetings with Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and at the opening of the summit.