IN HIS ADDRESS TO CONFERENCE ON DISARMAMENT, UNITED NATIONS SECRETARY-GENERAL CALLS ON STATES TO PRESERVE EXISTING FRAMEWORKS
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres addressed the Conference on Disarmament this afternoon, as it continued its high-level segment. The Conference also heard statements by dignitaries from Australia, Ireland, Slovenia, Brazil, Italy, Hungary and India.
Key components of the international arms control architecture were collapsing, Secretary-General Guterres said in his statement, noting that the continued use of chemical weapons with impunity was driving new proliferation, and thousands of civilian lives continued to be lost because of illicit small arms and the use in urban areas of explosive weapons designed for open battlefields. A new vision for arms control was needed in the current complex international security environment, and the international community had to take great care to preserve the existing frameworks which continued to bring the world indispensable benefits.
The Secretary-General urged the Conference to prove that it can add value to the multilateral system. If its members wished to reclaim the place for the Conference envisaged by its founders, they must return to seeking multilateral agreements, he said. The establishment of subsidiary bodies and the work done within them last year had been positive steps and the members should build on that progress. Procedural innovations, were important, but the Conference would be judged by the results it produced, concluded the Secretary-General.
Marise Payne, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia, said there was a frustration that the Conference had not maintained the momentum and ambition it had been established to provide. There was an urgent need to infuse new energy into the work of the Conference so that it could play the important part in the international rules-based order on which everyone depended.
Simon Coveney, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade of Ireland, regretted that the Conference had come to represent the malaise that was affecting the traditional disarmament and non-proliferation machinery. In light of arguments that progress on disarmament could not be made due to the deteriorating international security environment, Ireland stressed that multilateral disarmament was not a luxury but a necessity whose urgency grew as prospects for peace and security diminished.
Simona Leskovar, State Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Slovenia, called for the full implementation of the 2010 Review Conference Action Plan, including the action that called on the Conference on Disarmament to begin negotiations on a treaty banning the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons, in the context of an agreed, comprehensive and balanced programme of work.
Fabio Marzano, Vice-Minister for Sovereignty and Citizenship of Brazil, said that the newfound reliance on nuclear weapons in security doctrines was currently driving up the risk of nuclear war. As the world was witnessing the unravelling of disarmament, and as it approached the 2020 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, a grand dialogue on disarmament seemed to be in order.
Emanuela Del Re, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Italy, said that Italy viewed with concern the increasing tendency to bring disarmament negotiations outside the Conference on Disarmament. Today more than ever the international community faced the concrete risk of the marginalization of the Conference and ultimately its irrelevance; it was up to States to act to preserve and relaunch its role.
Péter Szijjártó, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary, said that the policy of countering emerging threats should definitely cover countering terrorism, while being firm on illegal migration and being firm on protecting borders, which was the obligation of States and a matter of security of a given country, just like countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and preventing terrorist groups from acquiring them.Pankaj Sharma, Permanent Representative of India to the Conference on Disarmament, said that the Conference on Disarmament had a number of credits to its record, however, questions were being raised about its effectiveness and efficacy, and even its relevance since it had not been able to conduct negotiations for more than two decades. Instead of trying to doubt its relevance and effectiveness, countries had to seriously introspect and reflect on its role.
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea spoke in reaction to statements mentioning denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, and reformed its firm commitment to establishing new bilateral relations with the United States and building a lasting peace.
The Conference on Disarmament will continue its high-level segment at 10 a.m. on 26 February, when it will hear statements by dignitaries from Slovakia, Iran, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Estonia, Latvia, and the Netherlands.
Statements
ANTÓNIO GUTERRES, Secretary-General of the United Nations, noted that key components of the international arms control architecture were collapsing. The continued use of chemical weapons with impunity was driving new proliferation. Thousands of civilian lives continued to be lost because of illicit small arms and the use in urban areas of explosive weapons designed for open battlefields. New weapon technologies were intensifying risks in ways no one yet understood and imagined, the Secretary-General said, stressing that a new vision for arms control was needed in the current complex international security environment. The international community had to take great care to preserve the existing frameworks which continued to bring the world indispensable benefits, he said, recalling that many of the most successful and ambitious disarmament and arms control initiatives over the past several decades had been those led by the major powers. Their drive to regulate and eliminate arms had been the product of a strategic understanding of how cooperation and agreement could be the most effective security tools to help prevent, mitigate and resolve armed conflict. Over the past seven decades, United Nations Member States had made great gains in that field, but those efforts were in increasing jeopardy. The situation was particularly dangerous as regards nuclear weapons, said Mr. Guterres.
The demise of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, if allowed to happen, would make the world a more insecure and unstable place, the Secretary-General warned. The international community simply could not afford to return to the unrestrained nuclear competition of the darkest days of the Cold War. The parties to the Treaty should use the time remaining to engage in sincere dialogue on the various issues that have been raised, he said, calling on the United States and Russia to extend the so-called “New START” Treaty before it expired in 2021, as it was the only international legal instrument limiting the size of the world’s two largest nuclear arsenals. The Secretary-General urged Russia and the United States to use the time provided by an extension to the treaty to consider further reductions in their strategic nuclear arsenals, and expressed hope that the leaders of the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would agree at the summit in Hanoi later this week on concrete steps for sustainable, peaceful, complete and verifiable denuclearization of the Korean peninsula.
The bilateral arms control process between Russia and the United States had been one of the hallmarks of international security for fifty years, Mr. Guterres said, adding that it was thanks to their efforts that global stockpiles of nuclear weapons were now less than one-sixth of what they had been in 1985. The arms control and disarmament regime had been built on the good-faith implementation of provisions and on rigorous verification and enforcement of compliance. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty remained an essential pillar of international peace and security and the foundation for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. The Secretary-General said that his Disarmament Agenda “Securing Our Common Future” was a useful guide for action by the United Nations system that had been created to serve as a tool to support the work of Member States, who had responsibility for providing a clear, ambitious and realistic vision. This vision should be a bridge from the lessons of the past to the emerging challenges of the twenty-first century, he said. The slow demise of the Cold War-era arms control regime is already having profound consequences, the Secretary-General warned, saying that Member States cannot let the world sleepwalk into a new nuclear arms race. He urged the Conference on Disarmament to take decisive action to safeguard and preserve the existing system through dialogue that would help restore trust.
Strong support for the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons showed that a majority of States wanted to eliminate the horrific weapons of mass destruction, which would only be achieved through constructive dialogue, the Secretary-General said, noting that one forum for that dialogue should be the Conference on Disarmament, but the world’s single multilateral disarmament negotiation forum had not undertaken any disarmament negotiations in two decades. As a result, arms control negotiations increasingly took place in different fora, including the General Assembly, or outside the United Nations framework.
The Conference on Disarmament should prove that it can add value to the multilateral system, and if its members wished to reclaim the place that was envisaged by its founders, they must return to seeking multilateral agreements. In conclusion, the Secretary-General called on members to build on the progress that subsidiary bodies had achieved last year, and noting that procedural innovations were important, he stressed that the Conference would be judged by the results it produced.
MARISE PAYNE, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia, said she was acutely aware of the complexity of the issues with which the Conference on Disarmament grappled. Chief among them was the importance of maintaining adherence to and respect for long-standing and carefully negotiated arms control regimes. There was a frustration that the Conference had not maintained the momentum and ambition it had been established to provide. There was an urgent need to infuse new energy into its work so that it could play the important part it should in the international rules-based order on which everyone depended. Australia remained firmly committed to working towards the ultimate goal of a world free of nuclear weapon, but efforts had to be both practical and feasible, for there were no shortcuts to disarmament.
The extension of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty was critical for global stability, said the Minister and urged Russia to return to compliance with the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. The international community should use the time ahead of next year’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference as an opportunity to consider its future. It was a fact, Ms. Payne said, that the world could not be rid of nuclear weapons today or within the current decade, but the international community could absolutely work towards further reductions. Australia supported the vital role of Security Council resolutions in moderating destabilizing influences, such as the resolutions calling for the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and said that those efforts had provided the framework for much of the efforts to address tension on the Korean Peninsula.
SIMON COVENEY, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade of Ireland, said that in recent years, the world had witnessed the creeping erosion of the rules-based international order, a rollback on commitments previously undertaken, and the failure of multilateral forums to fulfil their work due to growing polarization. Regretfully, the Conference on Disarmament had in many respects come to represent the malaise that was affecting the traditional disarmament and non-proliferation machinery, he said, noting that the inability to adopt a programme of work in more than 20 years was not sustainable. Growing political divisions must not allow us to forget that no individual State could address today’s threats in isolation, and that was why Ireland warmly welcomed the United Nations Secretary-General’s Agenda for Disarmament. It recognized that disarmament was more than a security issue, and for Ireland, it was cross cutting and had relevance across a broad spectrum of multilateral issues, including international development, the environment and cultural heritage.
Ireland was working to bring the horizontal issue of gender to the fore in international disarmament negotiations, both in terms of the gendered impact of conventional and nuclear weapons, and the need to ensure greater agency for women in all disarmament-related discussions and negotiations. Some States had argued that the deteriorating international security environment meant that progress on disarmament could not be made, and that we had to wait until the time was right. Multilateral disarmament was not a luxury, but a necessity whose urgency grew as prospects for peace and security diminished, said the Minister. The nuclear weapon States could not continue to deflect the majority of the international community’s call for the disarmament of their nuclear arsenals, therefore Russia and the United States must take the lead in restarting the reduction of nuclear weapons stockpiles and to extend every effort to ensure a new arms race did not begin.
SIMONA LESKOVAR, State Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Slovenia, reiterated Slovenia’s firm commitment to preserving effective, treaty-based international arms control, disarmament and non-proliferation as key elements of security for Europe and beyond. Slovenia encouraged Russia and the United States to remain engaged in constructive dialogue to preserve the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and to ensure its full and verifiable implementation, and to also extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty in 2021 for another five years. Slovenia commended the role of the International Atomic Energy Agency in ensuring Iran’s ongoing implementation of its commitment under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, and stated its support for all diplomatic efforts aimed at achieving the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula.
With the 2020 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference approaching, Slovenia called for full implementation of the 2010 Review Conference Action Plan, including the action that called on the Conference on Disarmament to begin negotiations on a treaty banning the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons in the context of an agreed, comprehensive and balanced programme of work. As an observer, Slovenia was open to any decision that could lead to substantive work on all agenda items of the Conference. Slovenia would also like to contribute to international peace and security and to disarmament also by participating fully in the work of the Conference, and it looked forward to a positive decision on expanding the Conference’s membership in order to ensure
FABIO MARZANO, Vice-Minister for Sovereignty and Citizenship of Brazil, reminded that the restrained membership in the Conference on Disarmament under a strict rule of consensus was meant to provide a high level of comfort to discuss and negotiate on the most sensitive matters of security interest. Realistically, the Conference’s credibility had relied on key treaties directly arrived at by the major powers. Brazil welcomed the Secretary-General’s Agenda on Disarmament as a notable effort to recognize, assess and respond to what everyone agreed was a deteriorating international security environment and said that no number of disarmament agendas would protect the world from resumed arms race at a higher level of risk if the existing norms were put to rest, superseded by worrisome trends at the national, regional and international levels, with no indication of what new agreements or regime could be established in their place.
The creation in 2018 of the five subsidiary bodies focusing on the core issues of the Conference’s agenda had been a breakthrough of sorts, to be continued in 2019 under progressively more detailed and committed agreements, paving the way towards negotiating mandates as issues matured. Brazil was ready to shift gears on a Fissile Material Cut-off Treaty, and it had accepted to facilitate convergence on the prevention of an arms race in outer space. Nuclear weapons remained the gravest existential threat to humanity, he said, noting that the newfound reliance on nuclear weapons in security doctrines was currently driving up the risk of nuclear war. As the world was witnessing the unravelling of disarmament, and as it approached the 2020 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference, a grand dialogue on disarmament seemed to be in order.
EMANUELA DEL RE, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation of Italy, emphasized the Conference on Disarmament was indispensable and unique body in the toolbox of the disarmament community and Italy viewed with concern the increasing tendency to bring disarmament negotiations outside the Conference, especially as it faced the concrete risk of marginalization and, ultimately, its irrelevance. It was up to States to act in order to preserve and relaunch its role, and to ensure that it fulfilled the purpose for which it had been created. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty provided the only realistic legal framework to attain a world without nuclear weapons, in a way that promoted international stability, said Ms. Del Re, adding that Italy continued to support the immediate commencement of negotiations within the Conference on Disarmament on a treaty dealing with fissile material for nuclear weapons, as well as the resumption of substantive discussions on negative security assurances.
Nuclear weapon States bore fundamental responsibility for the implementation of article 6 of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Italy encouraged them to seek further reductions in their nuclear arsenals. She called on Russia and the United States to extend the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty and to pursue further discussions on confidence-building, transparency, verification activities and reporting. Ms. Del Re expressed hope that the high-level summit between the United States and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea would set a concrete basis for the complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Italy also believed that the international community needed to remain committed to a full and effective implementation off the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, as long as Iran continued to strictly abide by its nuclear-related commitments.
PÉTER SZIJJÁRTÓ, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary, noted that the Conference on Disarmament should address the traditional and emerging threats and reminded that his country had been faced with the challenge of illegal migration in 2015, when 400,000 illegal migrants had marched through Hungary, violating its borders, and disrespecting its rules and regulations with their way of behaviour. Hungary considered that uncontrolled migration definitely gave more opportunity to terrorist organizations to send their terrorists and weapons through borders. Hungary was a proud contributor to the anti-ISIS global coalition with 200 troops on the ground, and warned that of ISIS new strategy of sending the former foreign terrorist fighters back to places they were coming from. 5,000 European citizens had joined to fight with ISIS and were making attempts to return to Europe.
The Western Balkans route would be used by those who would like to make attempts to return to Europe as foreign terrorist fighters, Mr. Szijjártó said, hence the policy of countering emerging threats should definitely cover countering terrorism, while being firm on illegal migration and being firm on protecting borders. That was one of the reasons for which Hungary had voted against the Global Compact on Safe, Orderly and Orderly Migration in the United Nations General Assembly. Protection of borders was not a human rights issue, but the obligation of States and a matter of security of a given country, just like countering the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and preventing terrorist groups from acquiring them. Finally, Mr. Szijjártó said that appropriate control mechanisms needed to be introduced and implemented in light of emerging new military technologies.
PANKAJ SHARMA, Permanent Representative of India to the Conference on Disarmament, said that the world was experiencing a considerable stress and was churning and reminded that historically, important global institutions and arrangements had emerged in response to such events. The Conference on Disarmament, the world’s single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum, had a number of credits to its record, however, questions were being raised about its effectiveness and efficacy, and even its relevance since it had not been able to conduct negotiations for more than two decades. It was India’s firm belief that the Conference was the most relevant and appropriate forum as it brought together all militarily significant States, including States possessing nuclear weapons. Instead of trying to doubt its relevance and effectiveness, countries had to seriously introspect and reflect on its role.
It was the time to revitalize the Conference and to bring it once again to the core of global disarmament efforts. In that context, India had welcomed and supported various efforts, including the Way Ahead Working Group and the subsidiary bodies in 2018. Terrorism, Mr. Sharma noted, posed the greatest threat to international peace and security, and became more serious when terrorists were able to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Having recognized that threat, India had been drawing the attention to it through a consensus resolution in the United Nations General Assembly on measures to prevent terrorists from acquiring weapons of mass destruction. India was a key partner in the efforts to strengthen global disarmament and non-proliferation, and in that context, it had launched an annual disarmament and international security fellowship programme.
Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, reacted to statements mentioning denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and said that it seemed that those were trying to put blame on the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea for the lack of progress. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea remained firmly committed to establishing new bilateral relations with the United States, to building a lasting peace, and to completing denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Imposing unilateral actions on one side with the aim to put pressure was not acceptable, and sanctions were not compatible with dialogue and mutual cooperation.
For use of the information media; not an official record
DC/19/12E