Tehran: Iran's parliament voted on Wednesday to urge the government to ''revise'' ties with the UN nuclear agency in a move seen as likely to reduce the country's cooperation with the international atomic authority.
The vote came four days after the UN Security Council decided to impose limited sanctions on Iran for its refusal to cease enrichment of uranium - a process that produces the material for either nuclear reactors or bombs.
Members of Iran's ruling hierarchy had repeatedly urged the government to cut ties with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN's nuclear watchdog, if the Security Council imposes sanctions.
''The bill gives a free hand to the government to decide on a range of reactions - from leaving the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to remaining in the International Atomic Energy Agency and negotiating,'' speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel said during the debate, which was broadcast live on state radio.
What steps Iran would take was not immediately clear. Legislators and newspapers have mooted that Iran might restrict the IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities - cutting the number of inspections and barring inspectors from certain sites.
The bill said that the government was ''obliged to accelerate the country's peaceful nuclear program and revise its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency based on national interests.''
In Vienna, the IAEA declined to comment on the vote.
The government supported the bill. ''This is a very helpful proposal,'' Deputy Foreign Minister Hamid Reza Asefi told the assembly. ''I ask legislators to vote for it.''
Speaker Haddad Adel said that 161 of the 203 legislators in the assembly voted for the bill. Fifteen legislators voted against it, and another 15 abstained. The opponents and abstainers were reformists and moderate conservatives.
The Guardian Council, a constitutional watchdog controlled by hard-line clerics, approved the bill very quickly - showing how seriously the ruling hierarchy regarded the move.
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