First, despite
all the agonising among the 65 CD members about the current deadlock, there has
been no emergence of a group of concerned countries to explore a way though the
impasse. Every month a new
president alone takes on the responsibility of finding a breakthrough. Why is this such a lonely task? Have members tacitly accepted that the
CD’s usefulness has come to an end?
After all, 16 years have elapsed since the Conference last fulfilled its
mandate as a negotiating body. If this
is not the case, why is there no coordinated activity – sustained across the
monthly presidencies – to shore it up?
The Secretary-General
of the Conference, Mr Tokayev, recently proposed the establishment of an
informal working group with a mandate to produce a Programme of Work that would
lead to negotiations. This idea has struck a chord with a number of member
states. It will be interesting to see whether those members actively lobby and meet
among themselves - ideally as an informal cross-regional group - to pursue this
promising avenue, or whether it is simply left to successive presidents to
painstakingly consult on its general acceptability.
Another
mysterious aspect of the CD’s malaise is this. Strong statements are made regularly by members of the
Conference about the need to negotiate on the topic to which they attach
priority. The trial of strength
over which of the core issues is “ripest” for negotiation amounts to a direct
clash of political wills. The result is that there is no agreement on anything.
The consensus needed for the Programme of Work and the conduct of negotiations
is altogether absent.
Why is this so
strange? Well, take the case of a
fissile material negotiation, or “fissban”. The principal proponents of this issue profess to being
frustrated by their inability to re-launch the negotiation that began and
prematurely ended in 1998 and has never been resumed. But what is stopping them from rallying their supporters and
conducting a sustained debate in Plenary, focused ideally on a working paper
containing a framework or elements of an eventual treaty? They don’t need a Programme of Work for
such an initiative – under the Rules, working in Plenary is the CD’s default
option (Rule 18).
Assuming such
discussions gather momentum in Plenary and build up the necessary trust along
the way, a negotiating mandate will in due course be needed to intensify the
work. And time will have to be
allocated to the working group in which the negotiations would be conducted. So procedural hurdles would still
remain. The CD would, however,
have rediscovered the will to work which is currently absent judged by the lack
of initiatives of the kind just described. This should in itself have a cathartic effect. By the way, a
“simplified” Programme of Work (see previous postings on this site) would be
the obvious vehicle for making time available for the intensified phase of
negotiations just noted (to be pursued alongside other business agreed by the
Conference).
Finally, it is
interesting to speculate why no state has come forward with any concrete working paper on fissile material negotiations in recent years? Draft treaties were
tabled in 2006 and 2009 by the US and by Japan and the Netherlands
respectively, while Brazil, Canada and Australia each made proposals in 2010. But since then, there has been nothing
quite as specific apart from the working paper of Bulgaria, Germany, Mexico,
Netherlands, Romania, Spain, Sweden and Turkey in June 2011. The lack of any recent proposal on fissile
material - as a new focus for Plenary debate - is hardly a ringing endorsement of the CD.
Maybe, as with
nuclear disarmament, attention is turning elsewhere. UNOG’s website records that,
in advance of the convening in Geneva in 2014 and 2015 of a Group of Government
Experts (GGE) on fissile material, 25 states and the EU have recently responded
to the UN Secretary-General’s request to submit their views to him on a fissile
material ban. The GGE will proceed
on the specific understanding that if the CD meanwhile agrees and implements a
programme of Work that includes the negotiation of a fissban, the GGE will
cease and any product of its work will be passed on to the CD.
With very little
time left during the current session of the CD for the tabling of concrete
proposals on a fissban, let alone a Programme of Work, and in the absence of
any member-driven, cross-regional initiative to caucus to overcome the
sorry deadlock, these mysteries about getting work underway seem set to remain
unsolved. Yet the solutions aren’t
nearly as complicated as the current, discredited efforts to agree fatally-linked,
multiple mandates in a single document. Persisting with the latter is the third and most worrisome mystery.
Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR
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