THE ROLE OF “SAFEGUARDS CRITERIA” IN AN EVOLVING SAFEGUARDS ENVIRONMENT

Since its inception the IAEA has sought to use objective criteria to justify the form, scale and intensity of its safeguards efforts at any given facility in any given state. These criteria became increasingly formalised over time until, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the “Safeguards Criteria” or “91-95 Criteria” were produced. The safeguards criteria were used both to guide inspectors in the conduct of inspection activities and as the principal point of reference in the evaluation of those inspections. In effect the safeguards criteria served as the lynchpin of the traditional safeguards system - they served to hold the system together. The implementation of additional measures under the existing legal authority of INFCIRC/153, combined with the new measures authorised under the Additional Protocol, moves the focus of the IAEA’s efforts away from the strictly quantifiable forms of safeguards towards measures that are more qualitative in nature. In some cases the new measures complement traditional measures, while in other cases they provide entirely new types of data that greatly exceed the value of anything that was available under traditional safeguards. The strict criteria-driven system of traditional safeguards needs to adapt to the realities of strengthened and integrated safeguards – this paper addresses the issue of the types of adaptation/evolution that are necessary in the concept of “safeguards criteria” and the implications this evolution holds both for the performance of inspection activities and for the evaluation of safeguards effectiveness.