Britain has today led calls for harsher penalties to be imposed on Iran, as Tehran defied a compromise UN sanctions resolution to punish it for its suspected nuclear weapons programme.
The Security Council approved a fourth round of sanctions in as many years yesterday, but Iran said it would go ahead with uranium enrichment and president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the UN resolution should be thrown "in the waste bin".
The 15-nation council passed a resolution that was the product of five months of talks between the United States, Britain, France, Germany, China and Russia. With 12 votes in favour, it received the least support of the four sanctions resolutions adopted since 2006.
Western diplomats argue it gives the EU, United States and allies a legal basis to impose their own much tougher measures.
"I think it is very important that the European Union does take further measures, that we show the European Union is prepared on this subject and others to use its weight in the world," British foreign secretary William Hague said.
US defence secretary Robert Gates said shortly before the UN vote it could clear a way for individual states and the EU to block foreign firms expanding Tehran's oil and gas exports and impose other curbs on business activity. The diluted UN resolution spares Iran's energy sector.
US president Barack Obama said: "We will ensure that these sanctions are vigorously enforced, just as we continue to refine and enforce our own sanctions on Iran."
The resolution passed despite "no" votes from Turkey and Brazil. "We would not want to participate in such a mistake because history will not forgive us," Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan told Arab League ministers on today.
"Isolation is not the solution to Iran's problems." He said Turkey intended, with Brazil, to continue engaging Tehran, having last month secured a nuclear fuel swap deal that they had hoped would head off sanctions. Mr Erdogan also announced plans to form a regional free trade zone with Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. Such moves will add to concerns the pivotal Western ally could be lurching eastward in its alignment.
Russia, often reluctant in the past to follow the West's lead on Iran, today said the new
UN sanctions did not oblige it to scrap a controversial deal to deliver surface-to-air missiles to Iran.
The Interfax news agency had earlier cited a Russian arms industry source as saying Moscow would freeze its contract to sell the S-300 missiles to Iran because of the sanctions.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu praised the new sanctions as a "positive step".
"We hope that this positive step will be followed by decisive actions by other countries, including sanctions targeting Iran's energy sector," he said.
"This resolution warns Iran that the world's leading countries are opposed to its nuclear programme," he said. "The biggest threat to peace is that the world's most dangerous regimes arm themselves with the most dangerous weapon."
Israel, whose jets bombed an Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and what it said was a nuclear facility in Syria in 2007, has hinted it could use force to deny Iran the means to build an atomic bomb.
Iran's envoy to the UN nuclear watchdog in Vienna said the sanctions would not undermine a nuclear programme it insists is for purely civilian purposes.
"Nothing will change. The Islamic Republic of Iran will continue uranium enrichment activities," Ambassador Ali Asghar Soltanieh said.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said sanctions were "the same as pesky flies". "These resolutions have no value ... it is like a used handkerchief that should be thrown in the waste bin," he added.
The sanctions resolution calls for measures against new Iranian banks abroad if a connection to the nuclear or missile programs is suspected, as well as vigilance over transactions with any Iranian bank, including the central bank.
It expands a UN arms embargo against Tehran and blacklists three firms controlled by Islamic Republic of Iran Shipping Lines and 15 belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The resolution also calls for setting up a cargo inspection regime similar to one in place for North Korea.
Reuters