France has taken note of the IAEA director-general's report. We thank him and his teams for the efforts they are making to clarify the gray areas of Iran's nuclear program. We encourage the Agency to continue them in order to shed full light on Iran's past and present nuclear activities.

The report shows that Iran, under the pressure of the international community, has provided new elements in response to IAEA questions (for example on the so-called P-1 and P-2 programs) but these are only partial responses. Considerable uncertainty persists and even increases with respect to the existence of a new generation of hitherto unknown centrifuges to which the IAEA did not have access.

As the six ministers of the E3+3 recalled on September 28 in New York, it is essential for Iran to comply with the international community's demands formulated by the IAEA board of governors and the United Nations Security Council. This requires Iran:

to respond clearly, fully and precisely to questions regarding its past and present activities and, as Mr. ElBaradei notes, for its cooperation to be pro-active rather than re-active;

to suspend its sensitive nuclear activities which, as the IAEA director-general notes, are continuing in violation of Security Council decisions. This would at last reassure the international community and create a positive context that would allow a start to the negotiations that we seek;

to implement the additional protocol and the other transparency measures demanded by the IAEA without which the Agency cannot confirm the absence of undeclared nuclear material and facilities in Iran. The director-general reiterated this with insistence in his report. He also emphasized that the Agency's knowledge of Iran's nuclear program was diminishing as Iran had ceased to convey certain types of information since the start of 2006.

Our preference, as we keep on repeating, is for dialogue and negotiation to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue. That is why the Six had encouraged Javier Solana, at their meeting on September 28, to pursue his dialogue with the Iranian leaders in order to encourage Iran to meet the Security Council's demands and resume negotiations. We are waiting for the report that Mr. Solana is to hand over to us soon on the results of his talks.

We recall that the E3+3 foreign ministers decided when they met in New York that a third sanctions resolution would be put to the vote in the UN Security Council if the two reports, M ElBaradei's and Mr. Solana's, did not note positive results from their efforts. On October 15, the Council of the European Union launched a study of additional measures that could be adopted in the European framework.