Informal Conference on Disarmament Civil Society Forum

Excellencies
Esteemed civil society representatives
Dear Colleagues and Friends:

A very warm welcome to all of you for this first-ever Informal Conference on Disarmament Civil Society Forum, which I have the great pleasure of hosting and chairing in my capacity as Acting Secretary-General of the Conference.

I really appreciate that so many of you have accepted my invitation to be here and to go beyond business as usual, which we so urgently need. Some of you, particularly amongst the panellists, have travelled from afar and I would like to express my sincere appreciation for your commitment to be with us today.

We are privileged to have a message for the Forum from the Secretary-General, which will place our discussions in context and which will highlight also the attention that is paid to the current state of affairs in the Conference. Let’s listen to the message together.

The Secretary-General has just set out our challenge: the mission of the Conference on Disarmament is to help maintain international peace and security through the adoption of disarmament instruments. The security of everybody - our collective future - is what is at stake. It is impossible to overstate the importance of the mandate of the Conference and impossible to overemphasize the deep responsibility that flows from this mandate. It is a responsibility that belongs equally to all members of the Conference.

Against an impressive past of agreements on landmark instruments such as the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, it is nothing less than shameful that the Conference has not been able to agree even on a Programme of Work since 1996 - despite the repeated efforts by many of its Member States for it to resume substantive negotiations. 19 years of inaction, 19 years of repetition, 19 years of disappointed expectations on the part of the international community.

It is a challenge to us all. And we cannot address this challenge in an intellectual vacuum, without dialogue with the people who are affected by our decisions - or rather by our indecision. In the 21st century, it is simply not sustainable to deprive civil society of a say on challenges that concern our very existence and collective future. The Secretary-General just outlined the positive and dynamic contribution of civil society to disarmament and arms control over the years - and I greatly appreciate seeing so many of them here today. It is our obligation, in my view, to tap into this resource and allow it to benefit the work of the CD.

The sceptics will say that dialogue is not a magic wand. That the blockage is not in the Chamber but outside. That we have to wait for the political stars to be realigned in favour of progress. But if the stars are not aligned, we have to work harder to realign them.

Against this background and based on this deeply-held conviction, the objective of this Forum is to create a space for a sustainable dialogue between Conference members, observers and representatives of civil society organizations and research institutions working in the field of international security and disarmament.

The idea is to exchange views on the items of the CD agenda to explore innovative ways of addressing the substance of the work of the Conference. The Forum is intended to serve as a platform where diverse and alternative ideas may benefit the formal work of the Conference - but freed from the confines of the Council Chamber and the reiteration of well-known official positions and statements.

Our work today will be organized in panel discussions, as Mr. Fung described in his remarks, focused on the four core issues on the agenda of the CD: nuclear disarmament; fissile material cut-off treaty, prevention of an arms race in outer space and negative security assurances. A fifth panel will discuss cross-cutting challenges and the way forward. The panels will be moderated by our colleagues in UNIDIR, to draw on the extraordinary wealth of expertise that this great Institute has accumulated over the years in the service of the CD and disarmament more generally.

We have worked to constitute the panels in a manner that would generate debate free of stereotypical positions. I hope you will all seize the opportunity to break free from the straightjacket of regular proceedings, to genuinely search for common ground where new solutions may be found.

As this is an informal meeting - and I stress the word informal - the proceedings will not be reflected as official records of the CD. But in my capacity as Chair I will issue a summary to all of you which will be the only output planned for the event. I will deliver the main points at the end of today and a final version will be circulated via e-mail shortly after the meeting.

Organizing this Forum has been challenging - and more so as we did not start out with a budget for it. So I want to take this opportunity to thank the Governments that have generously made financial contributions without which the event would not have been possible: Australia, Finland, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden and Switzerland. Thank you very much to all of you.

I look forward to a lively debate.

Let me now hand over to the first panel, which is on nuclear disarmament and is chaired by the Director of UNIDIR, Mr. Jarmo Sareva.

Thank you very much.