TEHRAN, 5 September 2005 — Iran said yesterday threats of UN Security Council referral would not persuade it to abandon its nuclear program.
US and European Union officials have warned they will push for Iran’s nuclear case to be sent to the Security Council — which could impose sanctions — if Tehran does not halt all nuclear fuel work and resume negotiations with the EU.
But Iran, which denies harboring secret plans to make atomic bombs, says it has no intention of freezing uranium conversion at its Isfahan plant — where UN seals were broken and work resumed last month.
“Gone is the time when they could deny Iran its rights by threatening it,” said Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi.
“It’s our legitimate right to have peaceful nuclear technology and we will not give that up,” he told a weekly news conference.
“The Isfahan issue belongs to the past and we are not going to go back on that, we should think of other issues now,” he added.
A report by the UN’s nuclear watchdog on Friday confirmed Iran had converted several tons of raw uranium into a gas at Isfahan which could at a later stage be enriched to make atomic reactor or bomb-grade fuel.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report also said it could not yet conclude that Tehran had no secret atomic weapons program. Iran says it has answered almost all of the IAEA’s outstanding questions about its nuclear program and that nothing has been uncovered which would justify sending Tehran to the Security Council.
Speaking on state television on Saturday night, the deputy head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization Mohammad Saeedi described talk of Security Council referral as “ridiculous”. Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, who has been engaged in a flurry of diplomacy with non-Western countries ahead of an IAEA meeting later this month, said Tehran would not be bullied.
Meanwhile, dissident journalist Akbar Ganji, Iran’s most prominent political prisoner, has been released from hospital after ending a hunger strike and is in a “generally good state”, the official news agency IRNA reported yesterday. But it was not clear if the dissident was back behind bars or allowed further recovery at home.
