Abstract
In September 2013, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors reviewed a report by Director-General Yukiya Amano on efforts to further strengthen the effectiveness of safeguards and increase their efficiency.[1] The report described an approach to the implementation of safeguards that had come to be known as the “state-level concept.”
Rather than being received as intended—as a blueprint for the next logical step in the evolution of safeguards—the paper and, more specifically, the concept it described triggered a decidedly vitriolic response.
Some member states have used this opportunity to call into question important measures to strengthen safeguards that have been in place since the early 1990s. Most disconcerting have been challenges to IAEA authority under comprehensive safeguards agreements to verify the nondiversion of declared nuclear material and the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in a state with such an agreement.
The IAEA board and General Conference will have another opportunity to address this issue when they convene again this month to discuss the state-level concept. The purpose of this article is to assist the parties involved in those deliberations in understanding the legal basis for IAEA authority to verify the correctness and completeness of state declarations under comprehensive safeguards agreements and, in doing so, to call attention to the possible unintended consequences of those deliberations if the recent challenges to that authority are allowed to prevail.
 
Read the article here.