During these barren years, no less than 90 presidents of the
conference have grappled with the task of developing a programme of work for
dealing with these four topics in a manner that is tolerable to the CD’s
membership. As required by the CD’s
rules, the responsibility for chairing the 24-week annual session of the
conference changes no less than six times each year.
Sharing the presidency in alphabetical order of member
states may be democratic, but it takes a toll on continuity. And during this past decade and a half it has also
proved a very lonely task. In the
absence of consensus on mandates for getting down to serious work, it has
fallen to successive presidents to conduct constant shuttle diplomacy among
individual delegations to find a breakthrough. While those consultations take place off stage, the CD is
effectively at a standstill. Disarmament
experts have begun to turn their attention to opportunities offered by new forums and approaches outside the conference.
Recently, the CD took a decision to mitigate both the
effects of the discontinuity of the presidency and also its loneliness. An informal working group has been
established to produce the elusive programme of work.
The duration of the new body will not be constrained by the rapid rotation of presidents. Even
better, as the group is open to all CD members and observers, a more
transparent and inclusive process for uncovering and narrowing rooted
differences of view should result (although this benefit will be tempered by
the apparent exclusion of civil society, again). Successive presidents will still have a role
in conducting private consultations with concerned delegations, but that will
no longer be the central dynamic.
One other reflection, in passing, on the rule to confine each
CD presidency to four working weeks... If the
conference does eventually succeed in elaborating and agreeing a programme of
work, the issue of presidential rotation will fall away. Attention would turn instead to the chairs of
the subsidiary bodies established to carry out the real work of the conference. The chairs of those bodies will become the key
actors, and on past practice they won’t – and shouldn’t – be rotated
month-by-month. At that point the CD
president’s role will revert largely to a titular one.
In the meantime, if the informal working group is to salvage
the CD’s credibility, it will recognise that its creation has surmounted a
current short-coming in the conference’s methods of work. An obstacle to face-to-face efforts, delegation-to-delegation, to forge the necessary compromises on matters
of real substance has been removed. The issue of presidential continuity has been dealt with, and the responsibility for settling the CD's long-standing differences has been placed where it belongs - on the membership as a whole. Let the thawing begin...
Tim Caughley, Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR
