Iran mission says IAEA board resolutions are legally flawed and inspections disrupted

Iran's mission to the United Nations said on Saturday that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has based its reports on Iran on resolutions of the Board of Governors that were technically and legally flawed, adopted through an abuse of process, and whose findings were ultra vires. The mission made the statement in a message posted on its X account.

The mission also criticized the reporting of IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi. It said that, as Grossi himself acknowledged, attacks on Iran's safeguarded nuclear facilities created unprecedented circumstances, disrupted inspections, forced the Agency to withdraw its inspectors and warrant consideration of Iran's security concerns.

The statement said the United States removed the aggression from biased resolutions but that its consequences cannot be erased from reality, adding that facts do not vanish because politics demands it. It further stated that normal safeguards implementation cannot and will not resume under abnormal circumstances.

The Iranian mission said the Board of Governors must address the root causes of the current situation, describing this as an impossible mission since, in its words, the Board embraces the aggressor as a member. The statement was carried by Mehr News Agency.

According to Mehr News, the remarks follow the Board of Governors' resolutions on Iran and Grossi's reporting, which the mission argued did not account for the conditions created by attacks on safeguarded facilities. The mission said the disruption to inspections and the withdrawal of IAEA inspectors stemmed from those circumstances, and it linked the resumption of normal safeguards implementation to a change in what it called abnormal conditions. It also repeated its position that the Board's approach is compromised by the membership of a state it described as the aggressor.

The report by Mehr News added that the mission's message was posted on X and set out its objections to the Board's process and to the Director General's reporting in a series of statements.