2015 UNITED NATIONS PROGRAMME OF FELLOWSHIPS ON DISARMAMENT STARTS IN GENEVA

The 2015 United Nations Programme of Fellowships on Disarmament starts today at the United Nations Office at Geneva with the participation of young diplomats and other government officials from 25 Member States of the United Nations.

Officials from the following Member States will be participating in the 2015 Disarmament Fellowship Programme: Argentina, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Germany, Ghana, Guatemala, Haiti, Japan, Kazakhstan, Lebanon, Malawi, Mexico, Myanmar, Nepal, Russian Federation, Serbia, Switzerland, Thailand, Togo, Turkey, United States of America, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe.

The 2015 Disarmament Fellowship Programme will last for a period of nine weeks and will include exchanges with representatives of Member States, senior officials of international organizations and members of the academic community and civil society on a wide range of disarmament, non-proliferation and arms control issues. The Fellows will be introduced to various aspects of multilateral negotiations and the disarmament machinery, including the work of the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva and First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, the operation of different treaty regimes, such as the Non-Proliferation Treaty^[1], the Biological Weapons Convention^[2], the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons^[3], the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention^[4], the Convention on Cluster Munitions, or the Arms Trade Treaty, and the role and functioning of several international organizations and structures, such as the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and the International Court of Justice in The Hague, the International Atomic Energy Agency, the Preparatory Commission for the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in Vienna and others. Furthermore, the Fellowship Programme will include study visits to Berne and Thun (Switzerland) organized by the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs of Switzerland as well as country specific study visits hosted by the governments of China, Germany, Japan (including Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and Kazakhstan.

The Programme will conclude at United Nations Headquarters on 29 October. The Fellows will be awarded certificates of participation by the Acting High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Mr. KIM Won-soo.

The United Nations Programme of Fellowships on Disarmament was launched by the General Assembly at its first special session devoted to disarmament in 1978 with the aim of promoting expertise in disarmament in more Member States, particularly in the developing countries. Implemented by the Office for Disarmament Affairs, the Programme has trained, in the thirty-six years of its existence, over nine hundred public officials from 164 Member States, a large number of whom are now in positions of responsibility in the field of disarmament within their own Governments or in international organizations.
For more information: www.unog.ch/disarmament/fellowship

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^[1]Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons.
^[2] Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction.
^[3] Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects.
^[4] Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer of Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction.


For use of the information media; not an official record

DC15/040E