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World Looks Aside While Iran Violates Sanctions: UN Report
Despite the fact that Iran has violated sanctions imposed against it by the United Nations Security Council and member nations were aware of these violations, no incidents of those violations were reported.
This startling claim was made in a report written by UN monitors and released yesterday. The findings were written by a panel of experts working for the UN committee on Iran sanctions and reported by Bloomberg.
The panel suggested that the willingness of world powers to avoid exposing Iranian regime’s violations was “a political decision by some member states to refrain from reporting to avoid a possible negative impact on ongoing negotiations.”
For example, General Qassem Suleimani, head of the Quds force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, was banned from travelling outside Iran. Yet, he was openly photographed in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon “reportedly organizing and training militia and regular forces in those countries.”
The report also mentioned another report out of the UK that documented how Iran was procuring nuclear materials from two blacklisted companies.
“This is a clear political decision not to publicize these examples of sanctions evasion in order to ensure that public reporting on this doesn’t in any way jeopardize the talks or harden congressional resolve,” commented Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who has advised Congress on expanding sanctions.
At the same time that the report was made public, the United Nations Security Council unanimously decided to renew the mandate of the panel of experts monitoring sanctions compliance by Iran until a final deal is reached.
Also on Tuesday, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Yukiya Amano, said that the IAEA could not confirm "that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities." Amano said that his agency could not “provide credible assurance” that there were not “undeclared nuclear material or activities in Iran.”
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