Last Sunday, the United States, France, Russia, China, United Kingdom and Germany (the P5 + 1) reached a deal with Iran to temporarily ease some of the sanctions aimed at curbing the regime's nuclear program. Per the agreement, Iran may not enrich uranium above five percent for 6 months, and it must oxidize its stock of 20 percent enriched uranium. Even though the deal allows low level enrichment to continue, the United States maintains that Iran has no right to enrich uranium. This is wrong. As a sovereign nation and a signatory to the nonproliferation treaty ("NPT"), Iran has a right to enrichment for peaceful applications.
Iran is a sovereign state. Under well-established international law, a sovereign state shares the same rights as all other sovereign states. Thus, if the United States, France, and Spain have the right to enrich uranium, so too does every sovereign state. Iran is no exception. By the simple fact of its existence, Iran shares the same right to enrichment as its fellow sovereigns.
Of course, Iran is free to compromise its sovereign rights as part of international agreements like the NPT. Under Article II of the NPT, Iran agreed to relinquish its sovereign right to acquire nuclear weapons. On the other hand, non-signatories (like Israel) retained the right to a nuclear arsenal.
Although the NPT never mentions enrichment, Article IV recognizes "the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination." The United States argues Article IV only recognizes a right to produce nuclear energy, and has nothing to do with enrichment. Under this interpretation, Iran has the right to produce nuclear power but it does not have the right to produce the fuel (enriched uranium) required to produce that power.
If this argument seems ridiculous, that's because it is. First, the right to enrichment does not arise from a treaty; it arises by virtue of a nation's sovereignty. And while the NPT signatories agreed not "to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons," they did not agree to limit their right to enrichment for peaceful purposes. Simply put, Iran has a sovereign right to enrichment and that right was not limited by the NPT. Case closed.
But even if we could ignore Iran's sovereignty (and we cannot), Article IV implicitly provides a right to enrichment for peaceful purposes. Common sense tells us that a right to do something, e.g. produce nuclear power, implies a right to do all of the things necessary to produce nuclear power. Beyond from enrichment, the generation of nuclear power involves numerous complex processes that are not explicitly referenced in Article IV. Do states have a right to mine uranium ore to produce nuclear power? What about a right to manufacture steam turbines? Is there a right to dispose of the spent fuel rods used in power generation? Only the most absurd interpretation would prohibit signatory nations from completing the preliminary steps required to exercise what the NPT describes as an inalienable right, i.e. nuclear power production.
Finally, the claim that Iran has no right to enrichment is disingenuous. The United States knew from the outset that the NPT recognizes a sovereign right to enrichment. Professors Flynt Leverett and Hillary Leverett recently recounted the original U.S. position:
"[W]hen the U.S. and the Soviet Union first opened the NPT for signature in 1968, senior U.S. officials testified to Congress that the NPT recognized a right to safeguarded enrichment. That was the position of the United States until the end of the Cold War-and then we decided to try to unilaterally rewrite the Treaty because we didn't want non-Western countries getting fuel cycle capabilities."
It's easy to see why the United States and its allies are unwilling to acknowledge Iran's right to enrich uranium. Having an enrichment program dramatically shortens the time it would otherwise take to create weapons grade uranium. Moreover, elements of Iran's government have sponsored terrorism, threatened Israel, and committed atrocities against the Iranian people. These are very good reasons to be skeptical of Iran's stated intentions. But mere suspicion should not deprive a sovereign state of its right to peaceful nuclear power under international law. Iran has that right, and the United States should acknowledge it.
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