The UN’s nuclear watchdog has asked the UN Security Council to hold Iran accountable for its failure to comply with safeguards designed to prevent the development of nuclear weapons, diplomatic officials said Wednesday.
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It is the latest chapter in a more than decade-long effort to monitor Iran, during which the country has moved from compliance to obstructing inspection efforts. These have included disabling monitoring cameras and subjecting inspectors to “excessively invasive physical searches”, according to former officials, diplomats and more than a decade of UN documents, as cited by CNN.
The board referred Iran to the Council for the first time in 20 years, citing Tehran’s failure to cooperate with a long-running investigation into uranium traces detected by inspectors at undeclared sites.
Western officials suspect the traces may indicate that Iran had a secret nuclear weapons programme until 2003. Tehran has denied pursuing nuclear weapons, maintaining that its nuclear programme is entirely peaceful.
Tehran was last referred to the UN Security Council in early 2006, after which the body imposed a series of measures, including sanctions, against Iran.
Since February 2026, when the US and Israel launched their air campaign against Iran, the IAEA has been unable to inspect any Iranian nuclear facility except the Bushehr nuclear power plant, as cited by CNN.
IAEA officials have said the inspection gap has disrupted the agency’s “continuity of knowledge” about Iran’s uranium, enrichment centrifuges and other monitored nuclear materials, leaving it unable to verify their status, quantity or location.
Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with the US and other countries established one of the world’s most extensive nuclear inspection regimes, overseen by the International Atomic Energy Agency.
For years, Tehran’s nuclear programme remained compliant with inspections by the agency.
But in the years after US President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal, Iran gradually and systematically breached its nuclear safeguards, according to contemporaneous IAEA reports.
The agency later concluded that Tehran had failed to declare sites linked to nuclear material.
