WASHINGTON – Iran is rejecting a demand from the United Nations’s nuclear watchdog to end its enrichment of uranium, which comes on the heels of another delay from the International Atomic Energy Agency in making a final judgment on Iran’s nuclear program.

“Iran will not accept any obligations concerning the suspension of enrichment,” the Islamic Republic’s representative to the IAEA, Hassan Rowhani, said yesterday at a press conference in Vienna.

The U.N. agency again delayed a final judgment on Iran’s nuclear program, but its board of governors did pass a resolution demanding the country stop all enrichment activities. Soon after, however, Iran’s Parliament passed a resolution declaring it would not comply.

“We will ask the government to resume uranium enrichment. The parliament has rejected the board of governors’ resolution and cannot be bullied,” the state’s news agency, IRNA, quoted a senior member of parliament, Ahmad Tavakoli, as saying yesterday. The speaker of the parliament, Gholam Ali Hadad-Adel, said, “Today the issue is whether Iran can trust the agency, and not the other way around.”

The international agency has pledged to reach a final conclusion on Iran’s nuclear program by the end of November. On Saturday, the agency issued a resolution that said the board of governors “considers it necessary, to promote confidence, that Iran immediately suspend all enrichment-related activities, including the manufacture or import of centrifuge components, the assembly and testing of centrifuges, and the production of feed material.”

In July, Iran’s nuclear energy agency cut IAEA seals on a facility for production of heavy water and resumed its construction. Five months earlier, the Iranians had promised to suspend such activity, as part of a deal with the IAEA to clarify its once-hidden research and enrichment activities.

Since 2003, the IAEA has sought to get a clearer picture of the nuclear energy program of one of the world’s leading exporters of petroleum. While the agency has yet to make a judgment on the intent of Iran’s program, interim reports from the IAEA have detailed examples of how facilities have been altered before inspectors arrive and how key questions regarding the uranium contamination of domestically produced equipment have yet to be adequately explained.

The Bush administration recently concluded that Iran’s violations are serious enough that there is ample evidence the country is building a nuclear weapon. Before last week’s IAEA meeting, John Bolton, American undersecretary of state, met with European diplomats to persuade them to recommend taking Iran’s violations to the U.N. Security Council. The council could censure Iran and possibly impose economic sanctions as a penalty for noncompliance.

On Sunday, the IAEA director general, Mohammed ElBaradei, sought to downplay the latest announcement from Tehran that it would not heed his agency’s call to suspend uranium enrichment.

“We should not lose confidence,” he said on CNN. “We have not seen any material that could be used to produce nuclear weapons.”

He also said the IAEA’s resolution was not so much a demand as a “confidence building measure.”

“I am asking Iran to please build confidence,” he said. “Work with me to build confidence with the agency.”

Mr. ElBaradei has said he supports a diplomatic initiative launched last September by the British, French, and German governments to persuade Iran to suspend its nuclear program voluntarily while inspections continued. Yesterday on CNN, Mr. ElBaradei took the unusual step of advocating a “comprehensive dialogue” with Tehran on matters that could conceivably extend beyond the purview of the IAEA, such as other security issues.

The executive director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center in Washington, Henry Sokolski, expressed doubt that America and the agency will be able to stop Iran’s quest to build a bomb, unless they say the nuclear nonproliferation treaty should not be interpreted as giving a country carte blanche to build nuclear-energy infrastructure.

“We are probably not going to succeed as we should in blocking Iran’s nuclear misbehavior unless we are willing to reject their claim that the treaty gives them a right to come within weeks to having all they need to make a bomb,” Mr. Sokolski said in an interview.

In the last week, senior officials of the Bush administration have warned that the Iranian government has a hand in some insurgency activities against American soldiers in Iran.

The Washington Times published an interview Friday in which Secretary of State Powell said, “I don’t think there’s any doubt that the Iranians are involved and are providing support. How much and how influential their support is? I can’t be sure and it’s hard to get a good read on it.”

On Friday, the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad, said in a briefing of reporters that the Iranian government was also providing support for forces in Afghanistan arrayed against the government there.

Mr. Khalilzad was the most senior American negotiator at Geneva in May 2003 with Iranian diplomats who offered to send members of Al Qaeda to third countries in exchange for Iranian rebels whom American forces had rounded up in Iraq. He is still one of the White House’s back channels to Iran, a country that has not had diplomatic relations with America since its 1979 revolution, in which members of the staff of the American embassy in Tehran were held hostage.

Mr. Khalilzad said “more troublesome” forces in the Iranian government are gaining influence now. In February, Iran’s council of experts blocked hundreds of reformers from running for seats in parliament, which their political bloc once controlled. Today the body is dominated by allies of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, whose powers the reformers had sought to limit with a referendum.