Conference on Disarmament: Time for Change

These are some notes that formed the basis of a talk on the Conference on Disarmament to the UN Disarmament Fellows on 21 August 2017.

1. In 1978, the UN General Assembly (UNGA) established the CD as a ‘single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community’ (see para 120 of the report of the First Special Session on Disarmament (UNSSOD-1)). It is a ‘single’ forum in the sense that it is a standing body with its own secretariat that can conduct negotiations sequentially on agreed topics. In that sense it is a convenient venue for disarmament negotiations, but it is not an exclusive one—it is NOT the ‘sole’ forum.

2. The CD was set up as a ‘negotiating body’. This is in contrast to the UN Disarmament Commission and the First Committee of the UNGA that are ‘deliberative’ forums—venues for developing understandings at most rather than legally-binding treaties. The last negotiations carried out in the CD were from 1994 to 1996 to develop a treaty banning the testing of nuclear weapons (CTBT). Since then, the Conference has briefly begun negotiations on banning fissile material and on negative security assurances (both in 1998) but neither negotiation was sustained beyond that year. Increasingly, States have turned to alternative forums – UNGA (e.g., for the ATT, FMCT and TPNW), Diplomatic Conferences (APMBC and CCM).

3. The CD is a negotiating forum of limited membership (65 States). UNSSOD-1 attached ‘great importance’ to the participation of all the nuclear-weapon States. To ensure this, decision-making has to be by consensus (i.e., the absence of a formal objection). This avoids situations, for example, where those States would find themselves in a minority, out-voted on matters affecting nuclear weapons. The consensus rule in the CD is not in itself the reason for the CD’s longstanding deadlock. But because consensus is the sole decision-making rule, there is a responsibility on all members to apply it in a principled way. It should not be treated as a blunt veto but should be used sparingly, ideally only in situations where genuine and exhaustive efforts to seek consensus have been made and where a State’s national interests would be palpably jeopardized. In any event, the difficulty of separating substance from procedure in relation to the weighty security topics on the CD’s agenda means that it is unlikely that members would agree to finessing the consensus rule in any way far less incorporating additional decision-making rules.

4. The terms of reference of the CD include practically all multilateral arms control and disarmament problems. Currently the CD primarily concentrates on four ‘core’ issues:

- nuclear disarmament,

- banning the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons (FM(C)T);

- preventing an arms race in outer space (PAROS); and

- assuring non-nuclear-weapon States against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons (NSAs).

The terms of reference of the CD should not to be confused with its annual agenda, or with the Programme of Work (PoW) which is required to be negotiated and adopted at the beginning of each year (Rule 28).

5. The Rules of Procedure of the CD are sometimes blamed for inhibiting the Conference. But the problem is less the rules themselves—after all, they served satisfactorily in the past—and more the manner in which the members choose to apply them. For instance, throughout these past 20 unproductive years the practice of linking mandates for dealing with all four core issues within a single Programme of Work is at odds with the rules. The PoW needs be no more than a schedule of activities - there is no need for it to embody any mandates let alone linking all four where, given the consensus rule, if there's a formal objection to one of the mandates in the PoW they all fail. Mandates, of course, are required for each negotiation the CD launches, but they don't have to be actually incorporated in the PoW.

6. During debates in the CD, States often lament the ‘absence of political will’ amongst members. But the problem is the clashing of political wills, not their absence. Some States want action and progress, but others prefer the status quo. Traditionally, security issues take time to negotiate. Sadly, however, efforts to recognise and overcome the clash of wills have been fitful and feeble. Hesitant attempts have been made to move away from PoWs that link all four core issues, to change the focus of the Conference to new issues, to intensify discussions via an informal Working Group on the way ahead, etc. These attempts have yet to bear fruit.

If the CD is to prosper once again, members are faced with a more existential choice. Is the CD going to surrender in effect to irrelevance in the face of the challenge of negotiating in a highly disturbed global security environment? Or is it going to respond to that challenge by getting back to basics:

- acknowledging that the longstanding and stale clash of political wills is bankrupting the legitimacy of the CD;

- interpreting the RoP constructively rather than the reverse;

- accepting that active diplomacy amongst the members is urgently required to find mechanisms for re-building long-lost trust and confidence—mechanisms for staggering the attention of the CD on its core issues rather than trying to deal with them simultaneously, mechanisms for developing pre-negotiations on technical issues and matters of definition, etc:

- recognising that the task of restoring confidence requires accepting the realities of the consensus rule while at the same time insulating it from abuse; and

- being always mindful that the advantages of existing as a single (but not sole) multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of the international community will continue to atrophy as negotiations take place elsewhere and the CD’s stature diminishes.

In short, the 'rationality and diplomatic solutions' sought of the CD by the UN Secretary-General at the outset of this year's session remain in urgent need of application.

Tim Caughley

Resident Senior Fellow
UNIDIR

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

In an earlier posting on this site, I suggested that the Conference on Disarmament move away from the complicated, multi-mandate annual programmes of work of the past 20 years. It was proposed that in order to get the CD going again, its focus should be substantially narrowed ideally to a single issue. And, the work programme should, as in the distant past, be no more than a schedule of activities for the year.

The current President of the Conference (Ambassador Vierita of Romania) appears to have a similar idea. His ‘initiative’ is to call for the setting up of a working group of the CD with the sole task of taking stock of the progress on all agenda items and possible new areas in order to identify the way ahead. He has invited support from CD members for this approach.

The objective of such a subsidiary body could equally be discharged by the plenary itself, the default mode ordained by article 19 of the CD’s rules of procedure. The President may feel, however, that the exercise of taking stock of progress is more efficiently conducted in the more informal atmosphere of a working group.—The necessary rebuilding of trust and confidence among members after years of bitter disputes over its priorities may be facilitated in such a group. And the initiative sensibly envisages that the chair of the group would be elected for the full session of the Conference rather than rotate monthly like the presidency.

The initiative is not described as a programme of work or a schedule of activities (as will be required under rule 28), although it envisages that the chair of the group would establish a timetable for 2017. Nor is it clear whether members of the public would be able to observe its sessions as they are entitled to do in the case of formal meetings of the CD. These are important details that the President will no doubt wish to clarify over the next week or so during which feedback from member states can be expected.

If the intention of the new proposal is to move away from the unsuccessful multi-mandated approach of the past two decades, it should be taken seriously. Its simplicity is to be welcomed, although in my view its additional idea of also setting up “Informal Thematic Working Groups” adds unnecessary complexity.—Such bodies may indeed prove useful but they can readily be established if and when a demonstrable need emerges and a climate of trust and confidence has been engendered.

At the least, this single-mandate focus could serve as an overdue test of whether members of the CD are serious about overcoming their longstanding deadlock. Passing this test will depend on whether the Conference is not only able to break old habits but also on whether it ensures that such a working group is not just business-as-usual under another procedural guise. In other words, if they pursue the President’s initiative, can members successfully debunk the saying that the more things change, the more they stay the same?

Tim Caughley

Resident Senior Fellow, UNIDIR

CD Back to Basics

As the 2017 session of the Conference on Disarmament (CD) is about to begin (on 23 January), here are 10 points which newcomers to the CD and others might wish to ponder:

1 The agenda of the CD covers some of the world’s most important security issues—nuclear disarmament; prohibiting the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons; preventing an arms race in outer space; agreeing on legally-effective means to assure non-nuclear-weapon states that nuclear weapons will not be used against them. These matters are also known as the four core issues of the CD.

2 The CD has made no concrete progress in dealing with these issues (or anything else) since 1996 when the negotiations on the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) were concluded.

3 The CD was established by the UN General Assembly as a negotiating body, not a deliberative (or ‘talk-shop’) forum. It has failed to fulfil its mandate for over 20 years. Its role as a standing body of the international disarmament community has thus atrophied. Disarmament negotiations have found new or alternative negotiating vehicles and institutions—UN General Assembly (Arms Trade Treaty; treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons) and treaty bodies (Anti-Personnel Landmines Convention; Cluster Munitions Convention).

4 In terms of the CD’s failings, the Conference is not under-resourced. It has a budget for 30 hours every week of fully serviced meetings with simultaneous interpretation into the 6 UN languages for 24 weeks a year.

5 And the Conference has ‘workable’ rules of procedures (RoP) that, although somewhat idiosyncratic, have adequately met the needs of the CD (and its predecessors) during successful negotiations of the past (for example, the NPT, ENMOD, Seabed Treaty, BTWC, CWC and the CTBT.)

6 The RoP are workable if the 65 states that are members of the Conference want to get down to work. There are, however, some constraints. As all CD decisions must be taken by consensus, the formal opposition of just one state can block a decision. And every year, work only begins if no state prevents agreement on the proposed schedule of activities for the annual session (the so-called ‘programme of work’). The more complicated the programme of work, the greater the likelihood that one or more states will oppose it. With three very short-lived exceptions (in 1998 (twice) and 2009), no programme of work has secured consensus since the decision in August 1993 on the mandate for the CTBT negotiations (CD/1212).

7 The draft work programmes that have failed to achieve agreement or implementation for two decades now have been unnecessarily complicated.  Rather than follow earlier CD practice of simply setting out a schedule of activities for the year ahead, for 20 years the programmes have also incorporated mandates for negotiating or otherwise dealing with all four of the core issues, to zero effect. Such mandates are indispensible, but there is nothing in the rules of procedure that requires them to be set out in the annual work programme.

8 This unfortunate current practice is not just complicated. It has the effect of holding work on any one of the four mandates hostage to each of the other three. A state that blocks consensus on the programme of work because of its opposition to one of the four mandates, prevents work taking place not only on any of the mandates but on the annual schedule of activities embodying the mandates.

9 This extraordinary state of affairs is not an accident. Some members regard it as a symptom of the tense global security environment, which is inhibiting progress on these kinds of issues. If this is so, then the CD should operate merely on an as-needs basis, re-convening only when there is a demonstrable new and promising development. Other states, however, believe that the Conference depends for its existence on being able to make a difference in times of global tension, the more so in the light of the relevance of the four core issues on its agenda. In relation to nuclear disarmament, for example, the words of the previous UN Secretary-General come to mind: “Some may claim that security conditions today are not ripe for the pursuit of further nuclear disarmament. I say this view has it completely backwards. The pursuit of arms control and disarmament is precisely how we can break the tension and reduce conflicts.” 

10 After 20 years of empty returns on its annual investment of 24 weeks, the CD’s integrity is dependent on it finally acknowledging either that its impasse is—and is likely to remain—chronic,  or that a new beginning is required. If the 2017 session is to arrest the CD’s decline, it should aim for a straightforward, business-like programme of work simply setting out a schedule of activities for the year. That schedule should foreshadow immediate negotiations on an individual core issue (or issues), or an emerging issue, to get the Conference going again. In short, rebuilding confidence and credibility from a less convoluted platform will require going back to the basics of the CD’s heyday. Otherwise, the sense that the Conference has become anachronistic - powerless to make a difference in addressing today’s international security challenges, may intensify.

Tim Caughley

Resident Senior Fellow

UNIDIR

Security and Nuclear Disarmament

A foundation of global strategic stability is regarded by a number of states as a prerequisite for progress on nuclear disarmament. In today’s troubled world, efforts to achieve such progress are seen as misguided, if not futile.

An alternative view is that the continuing existence of high numbers of nuclear weapons is a factor that contributes to the unsettled security environment. This perspective draws on a range of concerns about possessors of nuclear weapons—stalled efforts to reduce nuclear arsenals, increased investment in modernising those arsenals, apparent readiness of leaders or aspiring leaders to use or threaten to use nuclear weapons, and so on. Compounding this situation is the absence of trust between nuclear-weapon possessors and non-possessors and the abdication of responsibility by the Conference on Disarmament for negotiating on nuclear disarmament (and other) issues.

Proponents of these positions will be at loggerheads this month in the UN General Assembly-mandated Open-ended Working Group on taking nuclear disarmament forward (OEWG). The OEWG will conclude its work on 19 August and account for itself to the UNGA in October. Its respected chair Ambassador Thani Thongphakdi of Thailand has already circulated a draft report for the OEWG’s consideration.

Meanwhile, the beleaguered Conference of Disarmament gears itself up for making its own report to the UNGA. By the way, it is curious that some of those states that see the current international security environment as being unfavourable for progress on nuclear disarmament remain hopeful that the CD can in the same security situation nonetheless overcome its 20-year deadlock over how to negotiate issues of comparable strategic complexity.

In any event, perhaps in proposing a new topic (see our previous post), Russia is trying to get the Conference to side-step this impasse and turn instead to an issue of common concern—i.e., terrorism (in Russia’s proposal, relating specifically to acts of chemical and biological terrorism).

Another comparatively neutral option for the CD is to re-examine its ‘working methods’. For example, the idea of extending the one-month term of the CD’s rotating presidency has been put forward. But this would be a non-issue if the CD were actually in negotiating mode. This is because the chair of those negotiations would effectively become the CD’s power-broker. The Conference president would then become largely symbolic for the duration of the negotiations. The term of the negotiating chair, unlike the CD president’s, need not be confined to a single month.

Whether or not events this August in the CD will shape that body’s future and to what extent the course of negotiations on nuclear disarmament will be forged in the OEWG remain to be seen. But one thing is certain: the outcomes and their security ramifications will both be aired fully in the UN General Assembly later this year.

Tim Caughley

Resident Senior Fellow

The CD – some stirrings?

The Conference on Disarmament (CD) has just concluded its second session.  It will resume on 2 August for its final 7 weeks for 2016.

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

Hiroshima in the news

These are comments made by UNIDIR Fellow, Tim Caughley, at a Public Meeting organised by UNITAR at the Hiroshima International Conference Centre, Japan, on 1 June 2016

Future perspectives for nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.

The immediate future for multilateral nuclear disarmament is difficult to predict. There are only two certainties.  The first is that the global security environment will remain a complicating factor for making real progress on nuclear disarmament.  The second is that a new review cycle for the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) will begin in May 2017, building up to 2020 and the 50^th anniversary of entry-into-force of the treaty that year. It can confidently be said that of the three pillars of the NPT all parties retain a strong interest in sustaining two of them, the proliferation and peaceful use pillars. However, efforts to agree effective measures for shoring up the shaky third pillar—on nuclear disarmament—are, for the meantime, taking place in a parallel forum, an Open-ended Working Group (OEWG) established by the UN General Assembly. Those efforts are intensifying despite—or perhaps because of—the highly unsettled international security environment.

For the rest, the future can only be a matter of further speculation:

1. In the NPT review, what will be the attitude of nuclear-weapon states (NWS) to the sharpening focus on the nuclear disarmament pillar of the NPT in the OEWG?

2. And in the immediate future, what will be the outcome of the work of the OEWG when it meets again this August to agree its report and make recommendations to the 71^st session of the UN General Assembly?

3.  Equally, what will be the outcomes of any initiatives in the General Assembly this October to reconvene the OEWG or any other new group or negotiation that may be set up by UNGA71?

4. For instance, will UNGA71 agree on a new process stemming from one or other of two proposals made during the OEWG’s May for negotiations on a prohibition of nuclear weapons. One proposal was tabled by the entire group of Latin American and Caribbean states (CELAC). The other came from a cross-regional group (including 3 states from this region [i.e., Asia])?

5. Will states that do not support such a negotiation participate in it? The dynamic that might unfold could take this form: there could be pressure from nuclear-weapons states on their allies and friends not to participate.  On the other hand, there would be pressure from civil society on non-nuclear weapon states, including those that are allied to NWS, to attend and to press for a prohibition even if the NWS did not participate.

In any event, future perspectives are necessarily of a speculative nature at this stage.

Answers to pre-submitted questions covered the following points during the Hiroshima public meeting:

The latest meeting of the OEWG took place in May 2016. What is the significance of these sessions?

The significance lies in the fact that are taking place:

i) under UNGA rules of procedure (in which voting can occur if consensus is absent);

ii) in parallel to forums that have proved to be either blocked (Conference on Disarmament) or unproductive (NPT) and which both operate under the consensus rule for the taking of decisions.

As well as being able to take decisions by voting, the conduct of the meetings is more informal and flexible than the CD and the NPT. For instance, interactivity – i.e., an actual exchange of views or debate – is strongly encouraged.  Civil society participates actively.  The chair arranges experts to make presentations in order to stimulate debate.

How is the OEWG contributing to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation?

The OEWG is providing a forum in which all states are able to participate alongside intergovernmental organisations and civil society unlike the CD (65 members) and the NPT (which doesn’t include nuclear armed states, the DPRK, India, Israel and Pakistan).

What are the limitations and opportunities of these Open Ended Working Group meetings?

Limitations have resulted because the nuclear armed states have chosen not to participate, leaving the defence of nuclear weapons possession and the stationing of US nuclear weapons on the territories of some NATO allies to states under the nuclear ‘umbrella’. The opportunity for a direct expression of views from the weapon states themselves is an important missing ingredient.

Opportunities stem from the ability for civil society to be heard and to contribute to the debate.

How do milestones such as the visits to Hiroshima by the US President and US Secretary of State affect nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation? Do these visits help promote this issue?

The visits have various symbolic impacts, especially President Obama’s as the first serving US President to come to Hiroshima since the dropping of the atomic bomb. The visits affect nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation by their recognition of the unique impacts of a nuclear weapon on civilians (as opposed to conventional bombing), an impact wreaked by a single weapon rather than hundreds of conventional ones, an impact which is indiscriminate and, because of radio-activity, goes on killing people and affecting the health of survivors long after the explosion. It is impossible to imagine that visitors would not be affected by their visit to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with the aging of hibakusha (affected survivors) it will be left to all of us to honour their testimony and to press for a nuclear weapon free world.

What can be done to achieve a break-through for a world without nuclear weapons? What else could the people of Hiroshima do to promote nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation?

A nuclear weapon detonation, especially an exchange of nuclear weapons between enemies, will not respect national boundaries. And the risks of a damaging accident are difficult to calculate but are greater than zero. Therefore, everyone has a stake in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. A break-through will require much wider public understanding that the health, safety and security of everyone is at stake. The hibakusha and other people of Hiroshima can continue with their moving efforts to remind us all of the horrific and lasting impacts of a nuclear weapon.

Tim Caughley

UNIDIR