Lessons from Recent Consideration of the State Level Concept

This paper will identify lessons learned from the recent political-level consideration of the State Level Concept (SLC) for International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) safeguards. It will review the consideration of the SLC by the IAEA’s policy making organs, the Board of Governors and General Conference, from 2012, when the recent controversy began, through 2014, which it was resolved. It will examine the issues raised during that period, the key interests those issues represent, and how the IAEA Secretariat and Member States responded, in order to derive lessons for how to maintain support for strong and effective IAEA safeguards. The SLC controversy called into question key tenets of the strengthened safeguards system, including the responsibility of the IAEA to verify that states’ declarations under comprehensive safeguards agreements are correct and complete, and the its authority to use all available information relevant to drawing conclusions about correctness and completeness. The resolution of this controversy depended on the IAEA Secretariat’s commitment to maintain objective technical standards for safeguards implementation and to improve transparency over how it seeks to draw safeguards conclusions and why states should be confident in those conclusions.