Pledging their commitment to the success of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, more than 100 nations completed a two-week meeting of the pact in Vienna on 11 May 2012.
The two-week session highlighted the key role the Treaty asks of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which verifies the peaceful nuclear activities in the Treaty's non-nuclear-weapon states and supports the spread of peaceful nuclear technologies.
This was the first of three sessions of the Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) held in advance of the 2015 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference, which meets once every five years in New York to examine and discuss the 1968 accord.
Ambassador Peter Woolcott, Australia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva, chaired the first session of the PrepCom and prepared a Factual Summary of the discussion and working papers submitted by the States parties to the NPT.
Illustrating the IAEA's intimate role in the NPT's implementation, the Agency was mentioned in 29 of the 101 paragraphs comprising Amb. Woolcott's Summary and was referred to as the competent authority in the field of safeguards. States parties also considered its essential role in the global nuclear security framework, and underlined the IAEA's central role in the field of peaceful uses of nuclear energy, in promoting international cooperation, and in coordinating international efforts to strengthen global nuclear safety, etc. IAEA officials actively supported the PrepCom's Secretariat throughout the meeting.
"The PrepCom illustrated once again how central the Treaty is to international security, and provided an important opportunity to examine progress on the actions agreed by the previous Review Conference in 2010," said Christophe Carle, a senior official in the IAEA Director General's Office for Policy. "Within the IAEA's competence and authority, we continually strive to serve as best we can to achieve the Treaty's goals."