Iran: UN Security Council Resolution 1696 is 'of dubious legality'

Arms Control Association Director Daryl Kimball said in a telephone interview from Vienna. “Getting serious means focusing on the near-term problem that 20 percent enriched uranium represents,” which drives the “hysterical war talk in some quarters.”—IAEA Iran Visit May Offer End to War Talk Over Nuclear Work

Security Council Resolution 1696 is of 'dubious legality'. The IAEA's Iran file should never have been presented to the UN Security Council.

At the end of July 2006, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1696 made enrichment suspension mandatory under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which empowers the Security Council to act in the face of "threat to the peace, breaches of the peace, and acts of agression.'

In "The Age of Deception" (p199), IAEA Director General ElBaradei writes that the resolution was of dubious legality. There was still no proof that Iran's nuclear activity involved a weapons program. It was quite a stretch to say that a small laboratory-scale centrifuge-cascade constituted "a threat to international peace and security" when peaceful uranium enrichment is legal for all member states under the NPT.