WOMEN’S INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE FOR PEACE AND FREEDOM ADDRESSES CONFERENCE ON DISARMAMENT ON INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY

To mark the occasion of International Women’s Day the non-governmental organization Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom made its annual address to the Conference, in which they said given the 15 year stalemate in the Conference and the clear link between human rights and disarmament, United Nations human rights machinery, including the Human Rights Council, should be able to address issues of nuclear disarmament, the arms trade and military expenditure.

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, said for the past 90 years it had emphasized the links between military expenditure, the arms trade, violent conflict with the reduction of resources for social and economic development and gender equality. For almost 15 years the disarmament machinery had been paralyzed, and continued stalemate was not an option. If it could not adequately address the threats to that nuclear weapons posed, then progress must be made elsewhere. The links between human rights and disarmament were clear; the production, stockpiling and usage of weapons violated a whole range of human rights, including well-known humanitarian and environmental concerns. Nuclear weapons and the arms trade were topics that should be considered in the entire range of United Nations mechanisms and bodies that sought to ensure human security and sustainable development, and particularly the human rights mechanisms. The issues should be incorporated into human rights treaty bodies, addressed by special rapporteurs, and eventually tackled by the Human Rights Council in its Universal Periodic Review. If those bodies included nuclear weapons, arms trade and military expenditures in their concluding recommendations, production and usage of those weapons would be made more costly for Governments, both politically and ethically.

Another major link between human rights and disarmament was financial. Several nuclear weapon possessors had made significant cuts in their social welfare systems, such as healthcare, education and childcare, while spending billions of modernizing nuclear and conventional arsenals. Recent research has shown that at current spending rates, the nuclear-armed States would spend at least one trillion United States dollars (USD) on nuclear weapons across the next decade, as the world struggles to recover from a serious financial crisis. Continued investment in nuclear arsenals would continue to drain resources, in particular from the world’s poor. Over 1.2 billion people live in ‘extreme poverty’, (less than $1.25 per day) and 70 per cent of those were women. Over 300,000 children died each year because of poverty. All the time, all over the world, women and girls were being discriminated against: they earned less money than men and suffered the worst consequences of lack of education and of political and human rights. The World Bank estimated it would take between 35 to 76 billion USD per year for the global community to reach the Millennium Development Goal to halve poverty by 2015. Those amounts must be compared to the one trillion USD that will be spent on nuclear weapons over the next decade.

The League also spoke about the arms trade, and said that arms sales to countries where it was reasonably foreseeable that the arms could be used against the civilian population, and to violate human rights law should be related to the doctrine of the responsibility to protect. Real protection could only be realized through prevention, and therefore the arms trade treaty that will be negotiated in New York in July 2012 must have human rights and international humanitarian law at its heart. The success of initiatives to ban anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions was due in large part to those weapons’ negative humanitarian effects. Nuclear weapons were truly indiscriminate weapons with gross humanitarian consequences on an immeasurable scale. It was time to address the issue head-on – nuclear disarmament was an imperative for protecting civilians and their human rights.

The full speech will be available here on the Conference on Disarmament webpage.