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Ripples from Dublin
2008-06-05 21:08:00 It was a bit of an anti-climax coming back to Geneva following the historic breakthrough in Dublin last week that led to the adoption by 111 States of a new, legally-binding Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). (This will be opened for signature in Oslo in December and will enter into force as soon as 30 States have ratified it).After the suspense, drama, emotions and celebrations of Dublin, getting back to ?business as usual? in Geneva has not been easy. Not that most Geneva-based disarmament diplomats have had any choice in the matter: On Monday morning it was straight into a week of meetings of the Standing Committees of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. After two weeks of intense negotiations on cluster munitions, a further week of implementation discussions on landmines would not seem to me to be the ideal way to wind down. But the disarmament calendar has no mercy this year it seems.The Conference on Disarmament (CD) also continues to plod along, trying - valiantly but...
Arms and the Spaceman
2008-02-15 09:29:00 Having been quoted in Wednesday's New York Times and International Herald Tribune in connection with the presentation by Russia and China this week of a draft treaty to prevent the placement of weapons in outer space, I've been inundated by calls from journalists asking me to explain the significance of the move, Washington's negative reaction to it, and the likelihood that this development could break the long-standing deadlock in the Conference on Disarmament.So, how significant was this? Short answer: quite significant but not at all surprising. Preventing an arms race in outer space has been on the agenda of the Conference on Disarmament (CD) since 1982. Russia and China, together with five other States, presented elements of this draft treaty to the Conference back in 2002. The issue has been the subject of especially intense debate in the CD over the last 2 years. The presentation of the draft treaty by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Tuesday was simply the ...
Spurring on the Conference on Disarmament
2008-01-24 19:44:00 "A spur of conscience to the flank of plodding procedure" was how the Ambassador of Sri Lanka characterised the message delivered to the Conference on Disarmament yesterday by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.The 65-member Conference has been plodding along for more than 10 years now, unable to deliver a single disarmament agreement since completing its work on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996 (for some background, see our posting from August 2007 entitled, "Last chance for the Conference on Disarmament?").The Conference has managed periodically over the last two years to break into a canter thanks to some innovative coordination by the rotating Conference Presidents and sheer determination on the part of most Member States to break the deadlock in which they find themselves. Despite these efforts, the goal of galloping headlong towards a much-needed treaty to cap (and possibly then reduce) global stocks of fissile material for nuclear weapons has remained elusive.In expre...
Disarmament Grumblefest 2008
2008-01-10 08:42:00 As we foreshadowed in December, 2008 is gearing up to be a busy year for disarmament in Geneva. From 21 January, the Conference on Disarmament (CD) will resume talks to try to get back to work after a decade of blockage and inertia, for instance. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty will meet for the second preparatory meeting to its upcoming five-yearly review conference 2010 in Geneva from late April, after a tough start in Vienna last year . And, next week, representatives of member governments of the 1980 UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) will begin work to "negotiate a proposal to address urgently the humanitarian impact of cluster munitions, while striking a balance between military and humanitarian considerations".So, 2008 will be busy for disarmament. The real question is - will it be productive? Though Geneva-based disarmament processes like the Biological Weapons Convention are quietly boxing on, there are some wider doubts. Officials doggedly try to be p...
Last Chance for the Conference on Disarmament?
2007-08-13 05:14:00 The Conference on Disarmament -- "the world's sole multilateral disarmament negotiating forum" as its 65 member States frequently remind us -- has featured either directly or tangentially in a number of postings on this blog (see in particular August 8 and March 28). And with good reason. In existence since 1983, the CD has negotiated such landmark agreements as the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Its antecedents, which date back to the Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament of 1959-60, gave us the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Environmental Modification Convention. Despite its impressive track record, however, the CD has not been able to produce a multilateral disarmament treaty since finishing its work on the CTBT in 1996. This more than decade-long deadlock has its roots in disagreements on which issues to deal with next. There is broad agreement among CD member States that a treat...
The Power of Priming
2007-08-08 15:31:00 The human subconscious, it turns out, is more active than we think. And it can be primed in remarkable ways by seemingly mundane objects, smells and sounds, as a recent New York Times article outlined.The article reported, for instance, one recent study by Yale psychologists, which revealed that college students handed either a cup of hot or iced coffee on the way to class were influenced by the temperature of the beverage: when later asked to judge a person from a written description, those handed iced coffee rated them ?much colder, less social and more selfish? than those handed hot coffee. In another study, students were asked to play an investment game with an unseen player. The students were placed at either a long table with a black briefcase and leather folder or a backpack left at the end of the table. The results revealed that students played differently when the briefcase and folder as opposed to the backpack were on the table. According to the researchers, the briefcase ...
Getting the ball rolling in the Conference on Disarmament
2007-03-28 14:52:00 I first attended a CD meeting in 2003. I was fresh out of university at the time and assumed, rather naively, that I would require a large sheaf of papers to fulfil my note taking duties. I needn?t have bothered, however, as the meeting began 20 minutes after the stated time closed less than 5 minutes later. What a contrast to the first session of the 2007 year, which ended last week. I?ll forgive the delegates (and interns) for looking a little tired. I?d be too if I had to follow such an unforgiving meeting schedule for 10 weeks. It?s encouraging to see the CD finally shaking off its apathy. Prior to 2006, delegations would usually meet on a Thursday morning in a formal plenary meeting with private group consultations held at various times through the week while the CD was in session. Often, delegates? speeches to the Conference lacked focus and direction. Not surprisingly a few capitals began to question the financial and political value of maintaining a full time delegation in G... |
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