UN Security Council Votes to Pass Iran Resolution

On July 20, the fifteen nations sitting on the UN Security Council unanimously approved a resolution allowing the lifting of international economic sanctions against Iran. The resolution was a part of the agreement reached last week by negotiators in Vienna that included the United States, France, the United Kingdom, China, Russia, Germany (P5+1), and Iran.

The resolution will allow ballistic missile technology and heavy weapons to be supplied to Iran with Security Council approval, but the US stated that it will use its veto power to stop any such requests. Despite this promise by the US, this is problematic because it opens up the question of Iranian armament to debate on a point where the security council had previously stood united.

The terms of the agreement limit Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of heavy economic sanctions. It is legally binding for the UN but has no effect on the actions of the US or the European Union. The EU has separately voted to accept the terms of the deal and lift sanctions on the purchasing of Iranian oil. In the US, Congress still has time to review the deal. Should Congress pass a motion of disapproval, President Obama has vowed to use his veto power to overturn it. However, if two-thirds of the House of Representatives and the Senate vote to overturn the veto, the deal will not be accepted.

The UN resolution is set to come into effect in 90 days, and the deal reportedly calls for no sanctions relief to occur until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is able to review Iran’s current nuclear energy programs.

The UN resolution is supposed to have a built-in snap-back mechanism that could allow UN sanctions to be reinstated. If the Security Council receives a complaint that Iran violated the terms of the deal, it would require a vote on a responding resolution within 30 days or the sanctions are automatically put back into place. The snap-back mechanism is set to expire in ten years. Members of the P5+1 group have already stated that they will seek to extend it for five more years, giving the Security Council 15 years of supposed oversight of Iran’s nuclear program. Unfortunately, the snap-back mechanism is unlikely to actually be effective: Iran is far more likely to covertly cheat on a nuclear agreement than be openly defiant, making the reinstatement of sanctions incredibly difficult once they are lifted. Additionally, should sanctions be lifted and then reinstated, any activity conducted by Iran in the intervening time is still likely to be considered legitimate and difficult to enforce against.

If the nuclear deal is followed, all provisions of the UN resolution will be dismissed in a decade. This provision might mean that Iran will follow the rules of the deal for the required ten years because it will be subject to inspections, but that it will start developing nuclear weapons as soon as the deal expires. At the end of 2013, it already had enough low-grade uranium to produce at least seven bombs; at the end of 2014, it could make at least eight.

The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, said that the deal does not affect the US’s “profound concern about human rights violations committed by the Iranian government or about the instability Iran fuels beyond its nuclear program, from its support for terrorist proxies to repeated threats against Israel to its other destabilizing activities in the region.” She further said that “denying Iran a nuclear weapon is important not in spite of these other destabilizing actions but rather because of them.” In addition, she asked Iran to release three Americans who are currently “unjustly imprisoned” and to find Robert Levinson, an FBI agent who disappeared in Iran in 2007. The failure of the administration to include the release of the American prisoners in the deal has been highlighted by critics. By comparison, four Iranians held for engaging in illegal arms trades or other sanctions violations were released prior to the start of talks.

Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Gholamali Khoshroo, responded by saying that Iran has peaceful intentions and that “only through honoring commitments, displaying good faith and adopting the right approach can diplomacy prevail over conflict and war in a world that is replete with violence, suffering, and oppression.” He also stated that the “feckless and reckless action” of the US was actually the cause of problems in the Middle East.

As the Center for Security Policy has previously pointed out, the deal allows for “a continuation of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) possession and the lifting of the UN arms embargo, the process and fluidity of IAEA inspections of Iranian nuclear sites, lack of clarity regarding Iran’s past nuclear activity, monetary incentives that Iran could use for sponsoring terrorism, and the four American citizens that are still being held hostage in Iran.” However, though Congress still has time to determine whether or not the US will accept the deal with Iran, the rest of the world has effectively given the deal its stamp of approval. Money and weapons are set to be handed to a violent regime that former Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman has called “anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Sunni.”