The General Conference

The IAEA General Conference is convening next week in Vienna. For us at VERTIC, the General Conference represents an excellent opportunity to meet with old friends, meet with funders to discuss future projects, and of course to observe the IAEA membership debating the issues. The General Conference, or GC for short, consists of all IAEA members. It adopts its own rules of procedure. Each member state has one vote.

The organization's real powers do not lie with the conference, but with the Board of Governors. However, this does not mean that the conference is powerless. Its most important role is to approve the organization's budget – and the membership as a whole here has an excellent opportunity to control direction through budget allocation. If the conference is not happy with the way the budget looks, it may return it to the Board of Governors; ask it to do its homework and to resubmit the budget to the conference. The conference also has the power to approve the amendments to the Statue, and must, of course, approve the appointment of the organization's chief executive officer, the Director-General.

When it comes to substance, the conference's powers are quite limited. It may discuss any questions or any matters within the scope of this IAEA Statue. It may also discuss issues relating to the powers and functions of any organs provided for in the Statue. In addition, the conference may take decisions on any matter specifically referred to the General Conference for this purpose by the Board of Governors. Importantly, it may propose matters for consideration by the Board, and request from the Board reports on any matter relating to the functions of the Agency. The General Conference elects the organization's Governors.

So how is it organized?
The General Conference is organized into a "General Committee" (sometimes, but not always, referred to as 'the plenary') in which general statements are delivered, the "Committee of the Whole" (often referred to as 'the cow') and various subcommittees tasked to look at and draft the conference's resolutions. The General Committee isn't supposed to discuss substance, meaning that all resolutions are prepared in the cow.

Often, though, the real action is in the subcommittees. I've had the pleasure to observe the safeguards committee in action for three years straight – and its there where the real issues are aired. Most of it is, obviously, seriously uninteresting, such as the placement of commas and whether a certain sentence structure ever so slightly alters a meaning.

Sometimes, though, certain language triggers interesting legal questions, and may have an impact on the way the Secretariat does its business. What's the balance between state rights and obligations? What balance should be struck between the Secretariat's need to be free to do its job, and the member states desire to exercise some oversight and control? Many questions are surprisingly similar to those discussed at VERTIC's own annual general meeting.

What's going to be controversial?
This year's General Conference is due to discuss two interesting, and always controversial resolutions. The first is the resolution on the Middle East (see GC(52)/RES/15 for last year's resolution). The second is a resolution, proposed by Iran, calling for a ban on attacking nuclear installations, irrespective of whether they're operational or under construction.

This has been discussed before, as is highlighted in Iran's explanatory memorandum. Professor Alexandre Kiss, for example, explains that, "before the military operations of the Gulf War, on September 1990, the General Assembly of the International Atomic Energy Agency adopted a resolution recognising that attacks or threats of attack on nuclear facilities devoted to peaceful purposes could jeopardise the development of nuclear energy and emphasised the need for the Security Council to act immediately, should such a threat or attack occur".

Back in 1981, the Security Council, reacting to Israel's attack on Osiraq, said that this type of attacks constitutes "a serious threat to the entire IAEA safeguards regime". The Council's main argument, however, was that the attack on Osiraq was in clear violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits all forms of armed attack except in circumstances of self defence. However, the Security Council did not react to the Israeli attack on Syria a while ago. This does not mean much, since it has not been confirmed that the site in Al-Kibar was a reactor to begin with. It would be odd for the Council to uphold an almost 30 year old decision on no factual grounds.

There are now even examples of a similar prohibition in 'hard law'; the African Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaty explicitly prohibits any armed attacks on nuclear facilities (see article 11).

How states will position themselves on this issue will be very interesting to see.

VERTIC will cover the General Conference in some detail on Trust & Verify Online.

Update: a friend in Vienna points my attention to an essay entitled 'Protection of Civilian Nuclear Installations in Time of Armed Conflict' written by Professor Vanda Lamm, a former president of the International Nuclear Law Association. Good stuff and essential reading for those preparing this issue for the upcoming GC.