VIENNA — In a move Tehran condemned as a politically engineered attack on Iran’s sovereign rights, the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Board of Governors on Wednesday adopted a resolution referring Iran’s nuclear file to the UN Security Council, turning the consequences of military aggression against Iran’s safeguarded nuclear facilities into a pretext for further pressure on the country.
The resolution, pushed by the United States, Britain, France and Germany, passed by 23 votes to three, with eight abstentions. Russia, China and Niger voted against it. For Tehran, the vote exposes the fundamental   contradiction at the heart of the Western campaign: Iran’s nuclear facilities were attacked, normal verification procedures were disrupted by the resulting security crisis, and Iran is now being punished for conditions created by those attacks.

Kazem Gharibabadi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, denounced the sequence as an attempt to manufacture a case against Iran after the Western powers themselves had disrupted the safeguards process.
“They attack Iran’s safeguarded nuclear facilities, disrupt the normal verification process and then use that disruption as a pretext for issuing a resolution in the Board of Governors,” Gharibabadi said.
He added that such political pressure could neither conceal the failure of the policies behind the confrontation nor enable the resolution’s sponsors to achieve their objectives at the Security Council.
Iran’s permanent representative in Vienna delivered an equally forceful rejection, describing the U.S.-backed resolution as a political and distortionary instrument designed to pressure Tehran and force it into submission while deliberately ignoring the attacks on Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
The Iranian representative stated that the security conditions created by U.S. and Israeli attacks have made the implementation of Iran’s safeguards commitments practically impossible. 
From Tehran’s perspective, responsibility for that disruption cannot be transferred to the country whose facilities were attacked; it lies with those who created the security crisis.
The Iranian side also rejected Western accusations that Tehran was deliberately refusing cooperation with the IAEA. The departure of inspectors, Tehran says, occurred in the aftermath of attacks that made the facilities and surrounding areas unsafe.
Accusing Iran of non-cooperation under those circumstances, the Iranian representative said, amounts to presenting “a half-truth” and concealing the circumstances that made ordinary verification impossible.
The Iranian argument gains particular force from the documented chronology of the confrontation. The IAEA itself acknowledges that U.S. forces attacked three Iranian nuclear facilities on June 22, 2025, following Israeli attacks on Iranian nuclear sites. 
The U.S. joined Israel in attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities, severely damaging its enrichment infrastructure.
Tehran has therefore rejected the idea that inspection demands can simply be imposed as though Iran were operating under normal peacetime conditions. 
Iranian officials say nuclear facilities that have come under military attack cannot be treated as ordinary inspection sites while the threat of further strikes remains.
Iran has also castigated the IAEA and the Western governments backing the resolution for applying a double standard: demanding extensive verification from Iran while failing to confront those who attacked nuclear facilities operating under safeguards.
The vote also highlighted the sharp international divide over the Western approach. Russia, China and Niger rejected the resolution, while 23 members supported it and eight abstained. 
Moscow and Beijing have repeatedly opposed efforts to turn the nuclear issue into another mechanism for escalating pressure on Tehran.
For Iran, Wednesday’s vote is therefore not the end of the nuclear dispute but another chapter in a broader campaign of poli