Iran was selected to become one of the 34 vice presidents of the United Nations Nonproliferation Treaty conference, sparking strong criticism from the United States. The United Arab Emirates and Australia backed the United States’ position, while Britain, France, and Germany similarly voiced concern, Fox News reports.
“Rather than choosing to use this review conference to defend the integrity of the NPT and call Iran to account, we instead elect Iran a vice president,” Christopher Yeaw, U.S. assistant secretary for arms control and nonproliferation, told delegates during the meeting. “It is beyond shameful and an embarrassment to the credibility of this conference.”
Reza Najafi, the Iranian ambassador to the U.N., said concerns were “baseless and politically motivated.”
The United Nations says the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is a “landmark international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament.” A total of 191 countries have joined the treaty since it was first opened for signatures in 1968 and put into effect in 1970.
While Iran has been selected for one of the vice president roles, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) passed a resolution last year saying Iran was noncompliant with its nuclear obligations. “Iran has failed to provide the cooperation required under its Safeguards Agreement,” the 2025 resolution said, noting that Iran was found to have been “impeding Agency verification activities, sanitizing locations, and repeatedly failing to provide the Agency with technically credible explanations for the presence of uranium particles of anthropogenic origin at several undeclared locations in Iran or information on the current location(s) of nuclear material and/or of contaminated equipment.”
