Last Friday, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) submitted the second report on the status of Iran’s nuclear program as required by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Unfortunately, write David Albright, Serena Kelleher-Vergantini, and Andrea Stricker, the report lacks the information crucial to determining whether the Islamic Republic is in fact complying with the terms of the agreement:
Although Iran appears to be living up to most of its general commitments, the IAEA report continues to lack technical details about critical implementation issues. . . . It would greatly increase transparency of the JCPOA’s implementation if the IAEA released this missing information. Without this information, an independent determination of whether Iran is complying with the JCPOA is not possible. The lack of information also inevitably leads to questions about the adequacy of the IAEA’s JCPOA verification effort.
The IAEA strategy, evident in the first two reports, appears to be that it is committed only to report violations in detail. However, this strategy is not credible and undermines confidence that the JCPOA is being verified. It also raises a fundamental question: if the IAEA is unwilling to provide routine and adequate transparency, can it be trusted to be transparent every time a violation occurs? It is in fact unclear if the IAEA has reported all the violations thus far. It also appears that the IAEA is not reporting information relevant to loopholes in the agreement that Iran is exploiting.
Read more on Institute for Science and International Security: http://isis-online.org/isis-reports/detail/iaeas-second-jcpoa-report-key-information-still-missing/