CONTINUOUS COLLABORATIVE STATE EVALUATION

The conceptual framework of IAEA safeguards comprises the concepts, processes, approaches and guidelines that govern the design, implementation and evaluation of the international safeguards system. A key element of the conceptual framework is the evaluation of States’ nuclear programmes through the State evaluation process. In the course of this process, State declarations and the results of the IAEA’s verification activities are assessed for consistency with all other information available to the IAEA from a multiplicity of open and other sources. The results of this evaluation are documented in State Evaluation Reports (SERs) and support the drawing of soundly based safeguards conclusions. SERs are prepared by State Evaluation Groups (SEGs), consisting of the relevant country officers and other IAEA staff specialized in information analysis (e.g. in relation to nuclear material accounting reports, material balance evaluation, environmental sampling, satellite imagery, open sources, and nuclear trade data). Recently, the IAEA has given increased attention to ensuring that all expertise within the Department of Safeguards is deployed in a collaborative assessment, analysis and evaluation process. This initiative resulted in strengthened SEGs capable of conducting enhanced State evaluations. It has also allowed lessons learnt and best practices to be applied in the continuous collection, processing, analysis and evaluation of information. This paper describes the main elements of such continuous and collaborative State evaluations, the tools currently available to the IAEA to achieve this task, and the principal challenges encountered including ways to address them.