The CD remains in the grip of its 20-year
paralysis. There have, however, been several twitches of life this year. Draft
programmes of work tabled by the Russian Federation and the United Kingdom have
in different ways challenged the Conference to rethink the manner in which it
might best approach its responsibilities as a negotiating forum. (The last time
the CD exercised that role was in 1996 when developing a comprehensive testban.)
By way of an additional topic to the
perennial four ‘core’ issues on which the CD has long been blocked, Russia
proposed negotiations on elements of a treaty for the suppression of acts of
chemical terrorism. This new topic hasn’t broken the log-jam but it has caused
some soul-searching as to what the Conference might usefully take up if
progress on the core issues remains elusive.
The United Kingdom took a more radical
approach. Rather than repeating the CD’s stubborn, two-decades-long approach of
trying to set up a working group for each of the four core issues, the
UK proposed that there be just one such group. Its ostensible focus would be nuclear
disarmament, one of the four core issues (the others being fissile material,
negative security assurances and outer space).
Single-mandate proposals like the British
one are a welcome echo of the good old days of the CD (pre-1996). So too, are
work programmes that are cast in part at least as a schedule of activities. In
more productive days, the work programme was no more than a schedule of
activities, allowing real work – the development of a negotiating mandate – to
get underway at the beginning of the annual session.
Whether the CD is seeing the possible
beginnings of a return to better habits of the distant past is too early to
say. Russia has yet to convince all CD members that its proposal is an
appropriate topic for the Conference. The
UK has yet to convince all members that the proposed mandate is truly a
negotiating one and not a duplication of the discussion mandate of the current
UN General Assembly’s Open-ended Working Group (OEWG) on nuclear disarmament.
Time will tell.
One final point concerns the vexed issue of
CD v. OEWG. Given the emergence of forums such as OEWGs and GGEs dealing with
issues in parallel to those on the CD’s agenda, some debate has arisen about
the Conference’s true role. This comes down to recognising the difference
between “single” and “sole” negotiating body?
“Sole” has come to be used as though the CD
were the only legitimate multilateral disarmament negotiating forum. However,
UNSSOD1’s use of the words “a single negotiating body” was intended to mean
something else. What the General Assembly had in mind was that the CD would be
a standing body, a single - as opposed to the sole - forum.
That is, it would be a standing institution
to which key disarmament issues could be brought and negotiated by key states
as needs arose (assuming the necessary consensus). It was seen as more effective
and efficient to support a single establishment and maintain a single repository
of knowledge and expertise than to take up disarmament issues, one by one, in
an ad hoc manner. Not an exclusive forum for disarmament negotiations, but a
convenient, pre-existing, readily resourced one.
That point may seem esoteric, but in any
event competition breeds innovation. In the CD’s case, the signs of some re-invention
may slowly be emerging, if the Russian and UK proposals are anything to go by.
Tim Caughley
Resident Senior Fellow
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