Chair,

The United States extends its deep gratitude to the Director General and to his team for their continued efforts to verify Iran’s implementation of its Comprehensive Safeguards Agreement required by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, especially as Iran has, of its own accord, adopted legislation placing undue conditions on its cooperation with the Agency.

This Board will recall the Director General’s detailed assessment of long-standing questions related to undeclared locations in Iran, including locations where the IAEA detected the presence of nuclear material, and the connections between activities at those locations andIran’s pre-2004 clandestine nuclear program. For more than five years, despite exhaustive efforts by the Director General and the Secretariat to engage Iran on the need to provide technically credible explanations as required by its safeguards agreement, Iran consistently failed to do so.

In June, the Board took the necessary, appropriate, and long overdue step of adopting a resolution finding Iran in noncompliance with its safeguards agreement. That resolution called on Iran to urgently remedy its noncompliance. Since then, Iran has not engaged at all on the unresolved safeguards issues. Instead, Iran has done the opposite. It has now ceased implementing its most basic and fundamental obligations under its safeguards agreement, including by not providing the IAEA with required design information and other reporting related to declared nuclear facilities, and by not facilitating access by the IAEA for the purposes of verifying that information. TheBoard should be extremely concerned by this near-complete and prolonged loss of required information and access.

Iran does not get to pick and choose when and how to implement its legally binding safeguards obligations. Iran should be fully implementing its obligations as required by its safeguards agreement. It should be fully cooperating with the IAEA, to include implementing modified Code 3.1, and it should be fully implementing its Additional Protocol.

As mentioned earlier today, we note the Director General’s announcement that the IAEA and Iran have reached an agreement on the resumption of IAEA safeguards and verification activities in Iran. We reiterate that immediate and concrete action by Iran is both essential and urgent. If Iran’s failure to cooperate with the IAEA continues, and it is not fully implementing its safeguards obligations,this Board will need to be prepared to take further action to hold Iran accountable.

Iran has both an obligation and an opportunity to change course and genuinely cooperate with the IAEA. We hope it takes this opportunity.

With these comments, the United States takes note of the Director General’s report and requests it be made public.

Thank you, Chair.