CONFERENCE ON DISARMAMENT HEARS FROM ITS PRESIDENT ON THE DRAFTING OF THE 2018 ANNUAL REPORT

The Conference on Disarmament this morning heard an update by its President on the preparation of the annual report for the 2018 session.

Beliz Celasin Rende, Chargé d’Affaires a.i., Permanent Mission of Turkey to the United Nations Office at Geneva and President of the Conference on Disarmament, thanked all the delegations which had submitted their comments on the draft annual report for the 2018 session. The President also thanked all coordinators of subsidiary bodies who, following the conclusion of the subsidiary bodies’ work on 24 August, had informed that the convergence points in their reports far exceeded the issues of disagreement, and that the expectations to reach an agreement on the reports were very strong. Some coordinators had already circulated the updated versions of their reports, while others had indicated that they needed more time. It was expected that the remaining reports would be submitted by the end of this week, and all reports by subsidiary bodies would be brought to the Conference for adoption next Tuesday, 4 September.

Pakistan said that the draft annual report presented by Turkey represented a solid base for further work, and stressed that, with the divergence on almost all substantive issues, the key to the report’s smooth adoption by consensus was to “avoid the insertion of subjective political judgements”. If each Member State was to insist on reflecting their national positions in the report, it would turn into a protracted and futile drafting exercise, without contributing anything to overcoming the substantive differences that were preventing progress, said Pakistan. Instead, the tradition of using the stock phrase to reflect national positions in the report “all views and positions are duly recorded in the plenary records” should continue, as it had always enabled the Conference to adopt its annual report.

Kazakhstan recalled that the 2009 General Assembly resolution declaring 29 August the International Day against Nuclear Tests had been adopted by consensus at the initiative of Kazakhstan. Over the period of more than 40 years starting in 1949, approximately 450 nuclear explosions had taken place in the eastern part of the country. Kazakhstan had made the historic decision on 29 August 1991 to shut down the Semipalatinsk test site, and had voluntarily renounced the world’s fourth biggest nuclear arsenal, inherited from the Soviet Union. In commemoration of the International Day against Nuclear Tests, the International Conference of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization would open in Astana on 30 August under the theme “Remembering the past, looking to the future”, and a high-level plenary meeting would be held on 6 September 2018 in New York.


The next plenary meeting of the Conference on Disarmament will be announced in due time. The third and last part of the 2018 session of the Conference will conclude on 14 September.


For use of the information media; not an official record

DC/18/039E