Iran’s foreign ministry on Thursday summoned the envoys of Britain, France, and Germany over what it called a misuse of the UN Security Council to hold a closed-door meeting on Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Britain had on Wednesday warned that it would trigger a return of UN sanctions on Iran, if necessary, to prevent it from acquiring a nuclear weapon as the Security Council met to discuss Tehran’s expansion of its stock of uranium, which is close to weapons grade.
Iran has, however, denied any intention to develop a nuclear weapon, stating that its nuclear programme is purely peaceful.
Meanwhile, the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA, has warned that Iran’s production of uranium enriched to up to 60% purity—close to the roughly 90% weapons-grade level—has recently increased.
According to Western states, there is no need to enrich uranium to such a high level under any civilian programme, and no other country has done so without producing nuclear bombs.
It was gathered that the closed-door meeting at the UN was called by six of the Security Council’s 15 members, including the US, France, Greece, Panama, South Korea, and Britain.
The US mission to the United Nations said in a statement after the Council meeting that Iran was the only country in the world without nuclear weapons that was producing highly enriched uranium, for which it has no credible peaceful purpose.
Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Wednesday appeared to dismiss a US proposal for negotiations over its nuclear programme.
The French and German ambassadors as well as the British charge d’affaires were summoned Thursday to the Foreign Ministry in Tehran where the ministry's Director-General for Peace and International Security Mohammad Hassannejad Pirkouhi upbraided the three countries for “abusing Security Council mechanisms”.
"Holding a closed-door Security Council meeting on Iran's nuclear program lacks any technical or legal justification and is considered a provocative and political move in line with unilateral US approaches to stoke tensions," he said.
"The compliance of the three European countries with the unjustified US request to hold a Security Council meeting is tantamount to supporting a party whose unilateral and illegal withdrawal from the JCPOA and gross violation of Security Council Resolution 2231 in 2018 is the cause and agent of subsequent undesirable developments related to this document," he added.
Pirkouhi stressed that Iran's peaceful nuclear program is fully consistent with its rights and obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Safeguards Agreement.
"Iran's nuclear activities do not conflict with the JCPOA - as a document containing Iran's voluntary confidence-building measures in exchange for the lifting of oppressive and illegal sanctions against Iran - because according to the JCPOA, Iran is allowed to partially or completely suspend the implementation of its obligations in response to the violation of the other parties' covenants."
The JCPOA is the nuclear deal's official acronym for the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action under which the US, the UK, France and German undertook in 2015 to lift sanctions on Iran in return for limits on Tehran's nuclear program.
The Security Council meeting came a few days after the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors met in Vienna where world countries expressed their positions concerning the Iranian nuclear issue, Pirkouhi said.
"Holding a Security Council meeting on Iran's peaceful nuclear program is a destructive and discrediting interference in the Agency's technical mission and puts the normal process of Iran-Agency cooperation at risk," he said.
The three European envoys said they would convey Iran’s protest to their governments.
