A foreign ministry official said the 2015 review conference of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) failed to produce a declaration due to the opposition of the US, Britain and Canada to the proposed final document, a move which came in support of Israel.
The final declaration is a statement marking the end of each edition of the event documenting what has been agreed by the participants.
"While after four weeks of round-the-clock talks, the conference was expected to pass the final declaration today, the (proposed) document was met with opposition from the US, Britain and Canada," ISNA quoted Hamid Baeidinejad as saying in a message on his twitter account on Friday.
He said the three countries "expressed discontent with a part dealing with establishing a region free of nuclear weapons in the Middle East in the text of the document," proposed by the president of the conference, Taous Feroukhi, the Algerian ambassador to the UN.
The 2015 Review Conference of the Parties to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons kicked off on April 27 and was due to end on May 22 at UN Headquarters in New York.
Conferences to review the operation of the treaty have been held at five-year intervals since the treaty went into effect in 1970. Each conference has sought to find agreement on a final declaration that would assess the implementation of the treaty's provisions and make recommendations on measures to further strengthen it.
Iran, as the rotating president of the Non-Aligned Movement, did its utmost to help prevent the failure of the conference and because of the lack of cooperation from the mentioned countries, it proposed a short break in the conference for NAM member states to examine the issue and announce their position on it, Baeidinejad said.
"During the break, members of the movement held a meeting in which Iran's proposal was adopted as the basis for the NAM stance which was announced in a statement."
The statement said, "We would like to announce our deep frustration and dissatisfaction with the move by the US, Britain and Canada to cause the conference to fail through preventing the passage of the final declaration…. The NAM was ready to agree with the document despite many weaknesses in its text. But unfortunately these three countries risked suffering the consequences of their opposition to the document to help protect the interests of a non-signatory to the treaty which has jeopardized regional and international peace and security with its nuclear weapon capabilities."
The NPT is a landmark international treaty whose objective is to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and weapons technology, to promote cooperation in the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and to further the goal of achieving nuclear disarmament and general and complete disarmament. The NPT represents the only binding commitment in a multilateral treaty to the goal of disarmament by the nuclear-weapon states.
Israel has neither confirmed nor denied the widespread assumption that it controls the Middle East's only nuclear arsenal, refusing to allow its nuclear facilities to come under international regulatory inspections.
