How EURATOM evaluates five years of the New Partnership Approach with the IAEA

The European Commission represented by the EURATOM Safeguards Directorate (ESD) has the task to ensure on the territory of the 15 Member States of the European Union (EU), through a system of safeguards established by the EURATOM Treaty, that source and special fissionable material are not diverted from their intended use as declared by the user and that agreements concluded with a third state or international organisations are complied with. The Implementation of safeguards under the Non-Proliferation Treaty of Nuclear Weapons in the 13 non nuclear weapon states of the EU is governed by the tripartite Agreement INFIRC/193 (the Verification Agreement) between the Member States, EURATOM and the IAEA. Safeguards activities under this Verification Agreement are carried out jointly by the Agency and EURATOM. The Verification Agreement and its Protocol indicate that the Agency shall make full use of the EURATOM Safeguards System and specify that co-operation in the application of the safeguards shall be implemented in such a way as to avoid unnecessary duplication of EURATOM safeguards activities. In determining the actual number, intensity, duration, timing and mode of the Agency inspections, account has to be taken of the inspection effort carried out by the Community in the framework of its regional safeguards system. The Agency inspections are therefore carried out simultaneously with the inspection activities of EURATOM and Agency inspectors are present during certain of the EURATOM inspections. The working arrangements between the Agency and EURATOM have evolved over the years and have included arrangements known as the \"observation regime\" and the \"joint team\" under which EURATOM inspectors performed inspection activities under the observation of Agency inspectors or jointly with them, depending on the type of installations being inspected. In 1991 a review by both organisations concluded that these working arrangements had resulted in a IAEA safeguards regime in the EU that showed a high level of duplication and unreasonably inspector-intensive safeguards approaches that were vastly in excess of safeguards activities outside EURATOM , thus wasting IAEA resources. On 28 April 1992 EURATOM's Commissioner Cardoso e Cunha and IAEA Director General Blix decided that the efficiency and effectiveness of safeguards implementation according to INFCIRC/193 in the EU should be enhanced and signed the New Partnership Approach (NPA). This approach includes new working arrangements to replace the “observation regime” and the “joint team”, the use of commonly agreed safeguards approaches, inspection planning and procedures, inspection activities, inspection instruments and methods. The principle of one-job-one-person (OJOP), already very often applied in a pragmatic way under the joint team regime, was formalised, supplemented by quality control measures to enable both organisations to reach their own independent conclusions. The arrangements were designed in such a way that they would not result in unnecessary duplication of effort. The implementation of the NPA started gradually from 1992 onwards so that to day the two organisations can look back on five years of experience with the NPA.