WASHINGTON, 13 October 2006 — The six major powers confronting Iran over its nuclear program failed Wednesday to agree on sanctions to impose on Tehran and sent the dossier to their ambassadors at the United Nations for further talks, senior US officials said. Senior diplomats from the six — Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States — discussed the sanctions during a videoconference Wednesday morning, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told AFP.
“I think there is broad agreement on the potential sanctions that would be included, but not yet agreement on the specific items that would be in a resolution, that has to be worked out,” he said. The six have been debating for weeks over the kinds of sanctions to slap on Iran for ignoring an Aug. 31 UN deadline for suspending a uranium enrichment program that Washington and others fear will be subverted to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons.
But China and Russia, which both wield veto power on the Security Council, have balked at imposing the kind of punitive measures sought by Washington, with the backing of Britain. Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns, who has led the negotiations for the United States, said the process could still drag on for days, delayed in part by more urgent consultations about sanctions to impose on North Korea after it announced that it carried out its first test of the nuclear bomb on Monday.
“It’s a busy schedule at the Security Council this week,” Burns acknowledged in an address to the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. He admitted that discussions of sanctions against Iran that Washington had hoped to bring to the UN at the beginning of this week might not get underway until early next week.
Iran says its enrichment program is designed only to provide fuel for nuclear power stations and as such is allowed under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The five permanent Security Council members plus Germany drew up in June a list of 15 possible punitive measures against Iran as part of a “carrots and sticks” package that also included economic and political rewards if Tehran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment.
The United States on Wednesday denounced Iranian Interior Minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi as a “notorious human rights violator” and urged Iran’s judiciary to hold him to account for his actions. “The United States condemns the Iranian government’s ongoing abuse of the rights of its people,” the State Department said in a statement
The department said Iran’s decision to send Pour-Mohammadi to the Tripartite Commission of Iran, Afghanistan, and United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva earlier this week underscores the government’s “open embrace of repressive policies and those responsible for carrying them out.”
“Choosing Pour-Mohammadi to represent Iran in international deliberations on humanitarian issues demonstrates the regime’s continued disrespect for the international community and for the basic rights of its citizens.”
