UNIDIR side-event on 22 June 2017, Conference Room 1, at United Nations
Headquarters during negotiations on a Nuclear Weapon Prohibition Treaty:
Remarks by Tim Caughley
introducing UNIDIR publication ‘Negotiation of a Nuclear Weapons Prohibition Treaty: Nuts and Bolts of theBan’. The negotiation’s formal title is ‘United Nations Conference to negotiate
a legally binding instrument to prohibit nuclear weapons, leading towards their
total elimination’.
The first
of these two papers deals with a large number—but not all—of the draft articles
in the Conference President’s first draft of a nuclear weapon prohibition treaty or convention.
I’m going
to use ‘treaty’ and ‘convention’ interchangeably because, as legally-binding
agreements or instruments under international law, treaties and conventions
have equal legal effect despite views expressed to the contrary during the
negotiations: point number one.
Point
number two: Since that paper was written and placed on line at the beginning of
this session on 15 June 2017, the negotiations in this room have come quite a
long way. The paper remains relevant, though, because it focused on the issues rather more than on the wording of the draft treaty.
My third
point is about the lens through which we viewed the President’s first draft of
the treaty. This, I would describe, as ‘principle meets pragmatism’. Or, as
better expressed by Ms Izumi Nakamitsu, the United Nations High Representativefor Disarmament Affairs at the opening of this session of the Conference on 15
June: ‘legally sound, technically accurate, and politically wise’.
This
leads me to point number four. The prohibition convention is not intended to
provide a comprehensive treatment of verified dismantlement and elimination of
nuclear armaments as envisaged in the ‘Model Convention’ put forward in the
Conference on Disarmament and United Nations originally 20 years ago by Costa
Rica and Malaysia.
Three
weeks in which to negotiate a comprehensive agreement would not be nearly
enough. There have been occasions during the past few days when I have felt
that ambitions voiced here would have been more appropriate to a comprehensive
convention than to a mere prohibition. I make this point for two reasons:
- One, to
take issue with a related point implicit in some interventions that a credible
outcome to these negotiations cannot be achieved in three weeks. It can. A
prohibition treaty can be both succinct and aspirational.
- This is
related to the second reason. — As was foreshadowed in the President’s first
draft—and as has become clearer during these negotiations—a prohibition treaty
offers in part a framework of sorts
for future developments.
These developments
include, for example,
- the
addition of protocols (another type of binding agreement) by which
nuclear-armed states can join the prohibition convention (as discussed in the
second paper of this UNIDIR publication); and
- decisions
taken by States Parties at their regular meetings or Review Conferences.
In other
words, the treaty can recognize and provide for second generation issues
recognizing that as Ireland explained: ‘we cannot see into the future, we can
only allow for it’. As UNIDIR notes in our paper, the level of ambition of the
treaty needs to be tempered by this reality. Ideally though, matters that are
to be left for further treatment will be described as clearly as possible in
the final text for the future guidance of States Parties. Nonetheless, the
mandate for meetings of States Parties should not be a straitjacket, but
contain a reasonable degree of flexibility, a point stressed by Sweden among
others.
This
leads me to my fifth and sixth points.
Point number five is that the preamble will, of, course, provide
fundamental context—the treaty’s so-called object and purpose—by way of
direction for States Parties down the track. But to me, this does not mean that
the Preamble should be the proverbial Christmas tree—all bells and whistles. It
should on the contrary be short, succinct and to the point. The clearer it is,
the better will be the foundation for dealing with second generation issues,
Relatedly,
(point six) the treaty as a whole needs to be very clear about its relationship with other
relevant agreements, principally the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the
non-proliferation regime, Nuclear Weapon Free Zone Treaties, and the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and its verification arm. The prohibition
convention needs to sit comfortably as one among a number of elements leading
ultimately to the elimination of nuclear weapons (as contemplated in the title
to this conference and the United Nations General Assembly Resolution that
established it).
Obviously
the NPT, as such a widely subscribed treaty, deserves greatest care in such an
act of alignment. This is not only
because of its near universal status, but also because of the sensitivity of
nuclear weapons-possessing States not party to it to the manner in which the
NPT is referenced, for instance, in United Nations General Assembly
Resolutions.
In the
final analysis, the effectiveness of the prohibition treaty will be measured by
its success in eventually securing the commitment of all States not to possess or use nuclear weapons. The prohibition
treaty truly needs to provide a framework under which all States are able to
join sooner or later thereby preserving the post-dismantlement era as a nuclear
weapon free one. And I’ll stop there.
Tim Caughley
Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR
