US rejects European compromise on Iran

France, Britain and Germany revised a draft UN nuclear resolution yesterday in a bid to satisfy US demands that the UN strongly condemn Iran, but it was not critical enough of Tehran for Washington's hardliners.

Members of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Board of Governors have been meeting behind closed doors to find a compromise on a resolution condemning Iran's 18-year concealment of the full extent of its nuclear programme.

France, Germany and Britain originally proposed a resolution chiding Iran for "failures to meet safeguards obligations", a phrasing too mild for the United States. It also did not call for reporting Iran to the UN Security Council, as US officials had wanted.

Under pressure from Washington, which accuses Iran of developing nuclear weapons, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei and the eight other present and future EU countries on the 35-nation IAEA board, Europe's "big three" changed the draft to say the board "strongly deplores (Iran's) breaches", a diplomat said.

This was closer to Washington's thinking, but not close enough. Diplomats said US negotiators had agreed to forgo reporting Iran to the Security Council, which could impose sanctions, but still insist that Iran be declared in "non-compliance" with international non-proliferation obligations.

The United States also wants the resolution to include a "trigger mechanism" in the event of further breaches by Iran.

Washington has only a few allies on the board - Canada, Australia, Japan and New Zealand. But diplomats said small groups of board members were having unofficial meetings to agree on a new compromise that would make the Americans happy.

ElBaradei appeared to back US reservations about the original European draft resolution and called on the board to approve a text that both "strengthens my hand" and reacts to the "the bad news and the good news" about Iran's atomic activities.

"The bad news is that there have been failures and breaches and the good news is that there is a new chapter in cooperation with Iran," he said.

Iran denies having a secret atomic weapons programme and says it only wants nuclear power to generate electricity.

But in a new report on Iran, the IAEA said over the last two decades Tehran had failed to comply with obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by - among other things - secretly producing plutonium and enriching uranium.

While ElBaradei's report said there was no clear evidence to support US allegations that Iran had a secret atomic weapons programme, he said the jury was still out on whether Tehran's nuclear ambitions were entirely peaceful, as it insists.