Once more unto the breach ...

This week is a rare pause in a fairly comprehensive schedule of multilateral disarmament meetings that stretches until June. We've reported on the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons' (CCW) work earlier this month, and last week and this week there were regional events on cluster munitions in Mexico City and Bangkok.

While all of this was going on, the second five-yearly review meeting of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) met in The Hague. With the mainly bilateral focus of other diplomatic activity there, those involved in the CWC - not least on the civil society side - sometimes find the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) a bit of a lonely outpost compared with the multilateral hothouse atmospheres in Geneva, New York and even Vienna. In his very useful daily reports on the CWC review conference, researcher Richard Guthrie had this to say:

"The Hague remains less NGO-friendly than Geneva, New York or Vienna. A major part of this derives from less experience engaging with NGO activities. The experience of this Review Conference seems to be that a greater number of delegates appear to recognise that NGOs have a useful role to play in the efforts to reduce the global threat from the hostile uses of poisons."

It's about time, although, historically, the CWC is by no means alone in the arms control field in resisting diverse inputs. Meanwhile, this time around the CWC didn't have an easy time of it in attempting to achieve a review meeting outcome, which took until the early hours of Saturday morning. A declaration text has yet to emerge publicly, but my understanding is that wording on terrorism (including whether UN Security Council resolution 1540 could be specifically mentioned) and what to do about countries about to miss their treaty-mandated deadlines for destruction of their chemical weapons were at issue. You can read all about it, including Richard's daily reports, on the civil society web resource page Daniel Feakes and his colleagues set up for the Second CCW Review Conference.

Next week, the second preparatory meeting of three for the 2010 review conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) commences in Geneva. Disarmament Insight blog readers may recall that the first PrepCom in May last year in Vienna was very tough, with various Iran-related procedural shenanigans right up until the end of the meeting.

It's difficult to see how this second NPT PrepCom will be easier, but let's cross our fingers. Many Geneva-based disarmament diplomats in the corridors of the Palais already have a faintly harried look - the meeting hasn't even started! - although caucusing of various kinds has, of course, been underway for some time. And, there will be a great number of side events associated with the NPT. We hope to bring you updates from time to time on these nuclear doings.

As if the NPT wasn't enough, the Conference on Disarmament resumes on 12 May - although hopes it would achieve a work programme in 2008 after a decade of deadlock look once again to be fading. There is also the Dublin Conference to negotiate a treaty banning cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians from 19 to 30 May, which many from Geneva will attend. Then there are the intersessional meetings of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention back in Geneva for a week from 2 June, the IAEA Board of Governors meeting in Vienna at the same time....it's all go.

Fortunately, there is a way to keep track of most of this. Geneva Forum, which along with UNIDIR collaborates in bringing you Disarmament Insight, has a very useful disarmament calendar on its website. It's worth bookmarking in your web browser.

John Borrie

Photo by author of space sculpture in the Palais des Nations grounds.

Explaining Civil Society Schizophrenia

Tuesday's post on 'civil society schizophrenia' seems to have struck a chord. Apart from some insightful comments, which you can read, I've also received a number of emails from NGOs telling me that they are as puzzled as I am at the different levels of formal integration of civil society into multilateral processes of disarmament and arms control; from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention.

Some have suggested interesting explanations for this phenomenon. For example, Piers suggests that, although the diplomats dealing with all of these issues may generally be the same people, perhaps the NGOs are not. In other words, might not different levels of acceptability (to governments) of issue-specific NGOs explain the different levels of formal civil society integration across these issue-areas? Daniel Feakes points out, however, that the same NGOs that deal with biological weapons issues also tend to deal with chemical weapons issues but that the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) is decidedly more restrictive than the Biological Weapons Convention when it comes to granting formal roles to civil society.

An anonymous commentator on Tuesday's post suggested that NGOs are largely excluded from the NPT process because States with nuclear weapons consider them indispensable to their national security. While I would agree with this point as it relates to the NPT, this line of reasoning does not explain why civil society is largely excluded from the CWC process. States Parties to the CWC have renounced chemical weapons and yet NGOs still find it hard to gain access. Daniel Feakes did me the great service of suggesting where the CWC should appear in my Spectrum of Civil Society Integration, on which I now bestow the official acronym 'SCSI' (pronounced 'skuzzy'). The SCSI now looks like this (you should imagine these items stretched out on a single-line scale from left to right. As one moves along the scale from left to right, the level of formal integration of civil society increases):

Conference on Disarmament (CD) -- Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) -- Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) -- Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) -- UN Programme of Action on the Illict Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons (PoA) -- Convention on Certain Convention Weapons (CCW) -- Oslo Process on cluster munitions -- Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (Ottawa Convention)

Now that we have diagnosed civil society schizophrenia as a pandemic afflicting multilateral disarmament diplomats, how can we explain it? I do not think that one simple explanation will do justice to this phenomenon. Instead, I would propose the following set of four tentative explanations that, taken together, might give us a better understanding of what we are dealing with:

WMD vs. Conventional Weapons: A first-cut explanation derives from the blatantly obvious observation that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) are located at the left of the scale while conventional weapons are on the right. The Conference on Disarmament deals with non-WMD issues as well, of course, but three of its four current priorities are WMD-related - banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons, assuring non-nuclear weapon States that they will not be threatened or attacked with nuclear weapons, and nuclear disarmament. It is surely not a coincidence that the CD, NPT, CWC and BWC all appear next to one other on the left of the scale. Could it be that States 'trust' or see a role for civil society when it comes to conventional weapons issues, but not when it comes to WMD?

Potential vs. Actual Humanitarian Impact: The scale separates out, on the left, WMD with catastrophic potential humanitarian impacts from, on the right, conventional weapons with huge actual (and demonstrable) humanitarian impacts. We should of course never forget that nuclear, chemical and biological weapons have all been used in the past with devastating consequences. Chemical and biological weapons are banned, however, and nuclear weapons have not been used against humans since 1945. Guns, cluster munitions and mines, on the other hand, claim hundreds of thousands of human lives every year. They also maim, impoverish and condemn whole communities and regions to perpetual underdevelopment. Could it be that the more immediate and visible is the humanitarian impact of a weapons system, the easier it is for NGOs to integrate themselves into formal multilateral processes?

Old vs. New: It is interesting to note that, generally speaking, as one moves along the scale from left to right, the issues (or institutions) tend to become newer. The Conference on Disarmament can trace its origins back to the Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament of the late 1950s. On the opposite end of the scale, negotiations on the Ottawa Convention were completed in 1997. The time scale does not hold for all issues - e.g. the CWC post-dates the BWC by two decades and the CCW is older than the PoA - but a general trend is recognisable. Could it be that the more recently a multilateral process on disarmament and arms control is institutionalised, the more likely it is for civil society to be well integrated?

Geneva vs. the Hague (vs. New York): In his comment on Tuesday's post, Daniel Feakes attributed the difference between civil society integration in the BWC and the CWC to "cultural" differences between Geneva and the Hague. He pointed out that, "in Geneva, despite the restrictiveness of the CD, diplomats are fairly used to interacting with NGOs and with NGOs being around in the Palais [UN building]. In The Hague, most diplomats are bilateralists rather than multilateralists and seem to be less used to having NGOs around." This, in my view, is a very important point. There are also cultural differences between Geneva and New York when it comes to the way in which multilateral disarmament processes are conducted (see our earlier posting on "Is there a Geneva / New York Divide?). Could it be that the place in which a multilateral disarmament process is created and maintained can influence the degree of integration of civil society?

This is just a first attempt to explain why we observe different levels of formal civil society integration across different issue-areas of multilateral disarmament and arms control. None of the above tentative explanations is satisfactory on its own but, taken together, they begin to make sense (at least to me).

Please do let me know, by using the comments function at the bottom of this post, if you can discern any other patterns from the SCSI tealeaves. With your help, we'll crack this one yet.

Patrick Mc Carthy


Photo Credit: 'Schizophrenia' by LILLAjija on Flickr.

Do "non-lethal" weapons really exist?

Last week, I spent a day with a very interesting mixture of people talking about so-called “non-lethal” weapons. It was quite the multi-stakeholder encounter.

There was the demand side of the non-lethal equation; the police officers and soldiers who were interested in finding out what new technologies could provide in the way of enhanced capabilities to control riots, disperse crowds or otherwise apply force to sticky situations all the while minimising deaths and permanent injuries.

The supply side of the non-lethal equation was also well represented – the arms manufacturers, ever eager to apply new technologies in ingenious ways to respond to the demands of their customers. At one point during the proceedings, we were even given demonstrations of some of the newest non-lethal innovations; e.g. a handgun that fires jets of chemical irritant at 430km/h, a trailer-mounted gas dispenser, and the mother of all paint-ball guns (complete with colour-coded slugs filled with a choice of indelible or washable paint or chemical pepper agent).

Mixed in among the demand and the supply elements were what you might call the multipliers – research and technology professionals offering their services to help bring the two sides together.

There were, however, no lawyers present.

I’m not a lawyer myself, but I found myself stepping into that role on numerous occasions throughout the day, inadequately of course. After all, the debate on so-called non-lethal technologies throws up a lot of thorny questions, legal and otherwise.

First and foremost, what is a non-lethal weapon? Most definitions focus on the purpose for which the weapon was designed, i.e., to incapacitate people while minimising fatalities. But the lethality of a weapon is determined less by the purpose of its design and more by the context of its use. It depends on how, where and when the weapon is employed, the motivation of the user of the weapon and, crucially, the vulnerability of the victim of the weapon (for more on this approach, see Aurélia Merçay's posting of September 5).

Looked at in this way, an AK47 assault rifle is 100% lethal when used to execute a person tied to a post (the intent of the user is to kill and the vulnerability of the victim is very high). When used in combat conditions, however, an AK47 is much less lethal, killing on average less than 20% of those it hits.

Similarly, a Taser electroshock device, now used by numerous police forces, was designed as a non-lethal weapon and is normally employed as such. However, if the user has malicious intent or is badly trained and/or if the victim is particularly vulnerable (e.g. suffering from an epileptic fit) it too can be lethal.

As a final example, the incapacitating agent pumped by Russian forces into the Moscow theatre on 26 October 2002 ended the siege but killed at least 129 of the 850 theatregoers. That’s upwards of a 15% lethality rate; comparable with that of an AK47 under combat conditions.

The point that I am trying to make here is that there is no such thing, per se, as a “non-lethal” weapon. All weapons can be lethal under certain conditions.

Another point that worried me was that participants in the meeting did not seem to draw a distinction between the domestic application of non-lethal force by police and its international application by soldiers. This is a crucial distinction. The Biological Weapons Convention prohibits biological and toxin weapons, even in incapacitating doses, being used anywhere, either in a domestic or international context.

The Chemical Weapons Convention, however, contains an exception that allows chemical agents such a tear gas to be used in domestic riot-control situations. It is therefore legal, under domestic law, for most police forces to fire tear gas to disperse angry crowds. It would be illegal, under international law, for a soldier to do so in war.

The reason for this counterintuitive distinction? In a word, escalation. Allowing chemical weapons, even tear gas, to be used in war could lead to an escalation in chemical warfare retaliation that would be as bad, or even worse, than that experienced during World War I.

With such things at stake, we really do need to have lawyers in the room as well.


Patrick Mc Carthy


Reference

Photo Credit: Timophoto on flickr.

Last Chance for the Conference on Disarmament?

The Conference on Disarmament -- "the world's sole multilateral disarmament negotiating forum" as its 65 member States frequently remind us -- has featured either directly or tangentially in a number of postings on this blog (see in particular August 8 and March 28).

And with good reason. In existence since 1983, the CD has negotiated such landmark agreements as the Chemical Weapons Convention and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Its antecedents, which date back to the Ten-Nation Committee on Disarmament of 1959-60, gave us the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention and the Environmental Modification Convention.

Despite its impressive track record, however, the CD has not been able to produce a multilateral disarmament treaty since finishing its work on the CTBT in 1996. This more than decade-long deadlock has its roots in disagreements on which issues to deal with next.

There is broad agreement among CD member States that a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear explosive devices is ripe for negotiation. A number of thorny issues would have to be worked out -- would existing stocks of fissile materials be covered and how, if at all, would such a treaty be verified? -- but the will is there to negotiate. The United States even put a draft treaty on the table in May 2006!

However, some States, most notably China and the Russian Federation, would like to make such negotiations conditional upon making progress on preventing an arms race in outer space (PAROS). Both countries have fast-growing civilian space industries and are concerned about the lead that the United States has built up in space technology, with potential applications in both the civilian and military fields.

Until quite recently, linking negotiations on fissile material with progress on PAROS was considered unacceptable by the United States. But this all changed earlier this year during a period of quite intensive discussions in the CD when the United States signaled its willingness to discuss ways to prevent an arms race in outer space in order to get negotiations on fissile materials off the ground. The scene was set for a historic breakthrough. It seemed for a time as if the CD might actually spring back into life.

But the breakthrough has not materialised. China has been playing for time, arguing that it needs to study intensively the work plan that is now on the table. In the meantime, other countries have raised their voices with objections. Pakistan, for example, has argued that negotiating only on fissile material would be too narrow a focus for the CD and that negotiations should commence simultaneously on five issues!

Having built itself up with initiative, hard work and a healthy dose of realism during the first half of 2007, the CD is again rapidly deflating. Whether it can recover from this latest disappointment and go on to live up to its past glory remains to be seen.

What is clear, however, is that more and more governments are questioning the justification of maintaining disarmament Ambassadors in Geneva while the CD languishes. The more governments withdraw their most experienced disarmament negotiators to Capitals, the less likely it becomes that the "world's sole multilateral disarmament negotiating forum" will be able again to live up to that lofty description.


Patrick Mc Carthy


Reference

Picture: The Council Chamber, meeting place of the Conference of Disarmament in the Palais des Nations, Geneva (Photo credit: sara.wagle on flickr.com)