“Comprehensive and Balanced”: Sink or Swim

The report (CD/2033) of the chair of the Conference of Disarmament’s informal working group on the vexed question of the CD’s programme of work is commendably concise. Perhaps too concise. One of its conclusions appears to run together a number of separate issues.

The text in question says this: “The focus on the core agenda items should remain as a priority in order to find a consensus formula for a comprehensive and balanced programme of work” (paragraph 6 (a)). Let’s break this down in terms of the CD’s rules of procedure:

- The four core issues will require—if negotiations on each of them are to be undertaken—negotiating mandates individually or collectively.

- But there is no requirement that those mandates be incorporated in the programme of work.

- Nor is there any requirement that the programme of work be “comprehensive and balanced”.  This is simply code for linking all four negotiating mandates together so that none is agreed until all are agreed (in the time-honoured way of multilateral diplomacy).

The Conference is making things very hard for itself in the following ways:

-  Its programme of work need be no more than a schedule of activities.

- The negotiation of mandates can simply be listed as an item on that schedule, with an appropriate allocation of time.

- Lumping together the four core issues (dealing with nuclear disarmament, a fissile material ban, preventing an arms race in outer space, and multilaterally agreed negative security assurances) constitutes a hugely indigestible feast of work.  Even if negotiating mandates on those topics can be agreed, imagine the difficulty of finding consensus on the sequence in which they should be negotiated.  Negotiating them more or less simultaneously would be beyond the means of all but the largest delegations.

A short look at the history of the CD (repeated from earlier posts on this site) puts this mis-application of the rules of procedure in context:

The Rules of Procedure, as well as CD/1036 (a decision on the “Improved and Effective Functioning” of the Conference adopted on 21 August 1990), envisage a streamlined approach whereby the programme of work would be no more than a mere schedule of business rather than an overarching mandate or mandates for beginning to elaborate a treaty or a politically binding text on one or more of the core issues.

Decision CD/1036 led to the current rule on the work programme, rule 28, with its emphasis on establishing rather than adopting. This is not a matter of semantics. It means that having established through his or her consultations that no reasonable objection exists to the schedule of business (i.e., work programme) for the year, the Conference president would get work underway without a formal decision. In theory, the work programme, shorn of mandates, would be so simple as not to require a formal, consensus decision of the Conference.  It would be wiser, however, to establish formally by a decision of the CD that there was no objection to this course of action (i.e., consensus).

Returning to successful approaches prior to 1999 would involve the following:

1. In the opening days of the annual session, there would be an allocation of time to be spent on each of the 4 core issues and other substantive agenda items.  That schedule or timetable would also allocate space for the annual high-level segment and for agreeing the CD’s report to the UN General Assembly.  In addition, it would reserve time for discussion of the outcomes of its work especially on mandates.

2. In the course of its work on the core issues, the central matter for CD members to resolve would be: under rule 23 of the Rules of Procedure, is there a need to establish a subsidiary body in which engagement would be intensified? That is, does a basis exist for the negotiation of “a draft treaty or other draft texts”?  Note that a subsidiary body is generally regarded as being more appropriate for facilitating intense engagement than the comparatively stilted, formal option of conducting work in plenary, although under the Rules, plenary meetings are the default option.

3. As, when and if the questions arising under rule 23 are answered in the affirmative, members would immediately apportion time from the reserved allocation (see 1. above) for the negotiation of the necessary mandate(s).

4. Agreement on the negotiated mandates would require consensus. For so long as Members insist on linkages among the four core issues, agreement on mandates is most unlikely to be achieved individually.  The timetable would need to be flexible enough to deal with the reality that a package deal would thus need to be developed.

The key difference from the present situation is that work on the mandates would be taking place under an agreed, streamlined work programme within the rules constituting a schedule of activities shorn of negotiating mandates. With the work progamme blockage removed, the beginnings of a basis of trust might be regenerated. The focus would turn to determining whether a basis exists for developing a negotiating mandate, issue by issue, and hence for setting up subsidiary bodies and tackling issues of substance rather than procedure. The CD’s sense of purpose as a negotiating body would be restored.

It remains to be seen, however, whether the weight of a linked set of negotiating mandates will ultimately sink the Conference. There is a way, however, if there’s a will…

Tim Caughley

Resident Senior Fellow

The CD - a conundrum

With the Conference on Disarmament still gripped by paralysis, members are taking careful stock of the CD’s future.  Its role as “a single multilateral negotiating forum”, the mandate given it in 1978 by the UN General Assembly during its first Special Session on Disarmament (UNSSOD-1), has never been more in question. 

Given the Conference’s weighty agenda, what are the consequences for international security of this prolonged breakdown in multilateral disarmament diplomacy? 

It is tempting to think that the answer to that question depends on whether or not one has a nuclear arsenal. This is because the deadlock in the CD is preventing non-nuclear weapon states from:

• pursuing nuclear disarmament in the CD;
• securing legally-binding assurances through the CD that nuclear weapons will not be used against them;
• negotiating in the CD a prohibition of the production of fissile material used in nuclear weapons, a goal also shared by most of the nuclear weapon states;
• developing through the CD the means to reduce existing stocks of weapons-grade fissile material; and
•  legislating to keep outer space free from nuclear and other weapons by concerted efforts in the CD before it is too late to do so.

In other words, for concerned non-nuclear weapons states the CD’s stalemate must be intolerable in security terms.  Those nations have been rendered impotent in the face of some of today’s most critical global issues.  Impotent, that is, for as long as these issues are trapped in the CD.

And what about the perspective of states that possess nuclear weapons in their arsenals or which aspire to do so?  How does the impasse in the CD serve their interests? 

Let’s look again at the five bullet points above.  Deadlock in the CD means that nuclear weapon states are not being held fully to account on any of these issues.  The Economist recently observed that the “reality is that the big nuclear powers prefer stagnation in the disarmament conference to surrendering the consensus rule. It allows them to stall any initiative they oppose.”  

In other words, for the nuclear weapons-possessing states, deadlock in the CD preserves the status quo.  Sure, amongst other things the US and Russia are making valuable contributions towards nuclear disarmament on a bilateral basis, and those two states along with France and the UK have long since unilaterally declared voluntary moratoria on the production of fissile material for use in nuclear weapons.  But the driving consideration of the non-aligned countries in pushing for UNSSOD-1 was that disarmament should be placed on a multilateral footing in which they – and other non-nuclear states – would participate and have their say. 

For that reason, it is understandable that some non-nuclear weapons states continue to attach importance to the CD as a multilateral channel for strengthening international security.  But as other non-nuclear weapon states keep pointing out, the CD is not an end in itself but merely an instrument – a means to an end.  If the Conference can no longer carry out its role as a negotiating body, members wishing to pursue the issues identified earlier will have little option but to use other multilateral avenues. These might include the CD’s creator - the UN General Assembly itself, or diplomatic conferences or other ad hoc processes in which decision-making is not so hidebound as it has become in the CD. 

With each failure of the Conference to agree its work programme (whether of a comprehensive or a streamlined kind), the harder it will be for the CD to live up to the hopes of so many of its non-aligned founding members that it would provide a multilateral negotiating channel in which to seek security in disarmament. 

This situation is compounded by the reality that the CD is deadlocked not by a breakdown in negotiations but by an inability to agree even on the basis on which negotiations should proceed. This is a dismal and bankrupt state of affairs, the more so because the last occasion on which the CD fulfilled its negotiating role was 16 years ago in 1996 when the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) emerged from an intensive three-year process. 

The time has come to move on from the tired recycling of discussions into a new dimension for the pressing issues languishing on the CD’s agenda.  In the absence of more enlightened applications of the rules on decision-making and on the content of the programme of work, enduring attachment to the CD - whether sentimental or cynical - needs to be seen for what it is – a serious obstacle to multilateral progress on nuclear disarmament and associated issues and to international security.

This is a guest post by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR. For other comments on the CD in this series see particularly postings dated 21 February 2012, 4 January 2012, 29 November 2011 and 16 March 2011.

The CD: trying to square a circle

The Conference on Disarmament (CD), now into the second month of its annual session, remains frozen to the spot.  No sign of a thaw has emerged, but there has, at least, been a mood-change – the sword of Damocles hanging over the Conference is being taken more seriously now.  In the sombre words of the UN Secretary-General’s Personal Representative to the CD, the current situation has created “a serious credibility and legitimacy deficit. The future of the Conference is at stake”.

Mr Tokayev placed his comments not only in the context of “the existential threat” posed by nuclear weapons but also against the stark backdrop of “budgetary austerity”, reminding the 65 member states that the work of the CD is funded by the entire membership of the United Nations through the UN’s regular budget. He also offered some concrete ideas for ending the CD’s barren streak of 15 successive years in which the CD has produced dividends neither for international security nor for long-suffering global taxpayers.

Another trend this year is a growing readiness amongst Conference members – and observer states – to offer constructive ideas for possible ways forward.  Members are less and less attributing the impasse in the Conference simply to a “lack of political will”.  Increasingly, the problems in the CD are being seen for what they are – a clash, not a lack, of political wills and tyranny by a minority. Divergent priorities – compounded by continuous misuse of the rules on the programme of work and consensus - are thus cancelled out.  Gridlock reigns.

The Geneva Forum recently held an orientation programme for new disarmament diplomats. A young delegate from a non-member state wondered aloud how a body with the international standing of the CD could allow itself to become hidebound by a matter as mundane as agreeing an annual work programme.  How, he asked, could this situation be explained to his government which was considering seeking observer status?  Good question.

The answer lies at two levels. There is a deep-seated aversion among some members towards issues which they regard as contrary to their national interests but which are being pursued by others in their own national interest. This is the clash of positions mentioned earlier, but it is magnified because it applies across four distinct issues, not just one, and allows a tiny minority to impose its will.  And, secondly, there is the unfortunate spider web that has been woven round these four “core” issues, wrapping them together in one toxic package.

For example, some states want to negotiate a ban on the future production of fissile material while others will only enter into to such an exercise if existing stocks of fissile material are included in the negotiating mandate. Many states want to negotiate or at least get down to pre-negotiations on an agreement on nuclear disarmament while others are content in the knowledge that no progress will be made on this issue for so long as there’s a standoff on fissile material negotiations, or outer space, or security assurances.

Why, the young delegate might have wondered, can’t the four core issues be dealt with separately?  The answer is that they can.  But those few members that prefer the status quo – no multilateral nuclear disarmament, no curbs on the production of fissile material, no action to prevent an arms race in outer space, no multilateral regime to provide security assurances to non-nuclear weapon states – have no incentive to de-link the four issues. Ever since the CD took the fatal plunge in 1999 of trying to incorporate negotiating and other mandates into its annual work programme, the Conference has been in the grip of the naysayers.

If the impasse is intentional, what incentives can be used to get the web untangled?  Or to be more precise, how can the nuclear weapons-possessing states be persuaded that it is in their best interests to unblock the CD? Judging from this year’s debate on the future of the Conference, these questions pose a real dilemma. Saving the institution is one thing: making progress on an issue vital to international security is another matter altogether.  Many non-nuclear weapon states (NNWS) are asserting that their priority in the CD is nuclear disarmament.  In the face of speculation that negotiations on fissile material might be pursued outside the CD, some NNWS are also saying that they are opposed to issues being hived off for less-inclusive treatment elsewhere.

Those states are going to have to make a difficult choice.  Nuclear disarmament, their main priority, is trapped in the CD – at least for so long as the Conference chooses to overload its draft work programme and tolerate irresponsible use of the consensus rule.  What will be the position of those states when their top priority becomes the subject of such irresistible pressure that negotiations on nuclear disarmament get underway outside the blocked CD?  Could the fear of this eventuality be the incentive to impel the nuclear weapon states to revive the CD?   After all, the CD offers them a comfort that is available nowhere else, not even in the NPT – the comfort that decisions can be taken only by consensus.

In the meantime, as Mr Tokayev put it, the CD is “trying to square a circle”.  For the young participant in the Geneva Forum orientation, the message to his government, in these circumstances, might best be to raise questions like his in the UN General Assembly where the views of the broadest constituency of nations can be brought to bear on the Conference on Disarmament whose future lies so delicately in the balance.

This is a guest post by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR – for other comments on the CD see also here.

The diagram is a file adapted from the Wikimedia Commons.

Prospects for the Conference on Disarmament in 2012

Prospects for the Conference on Disarmament in 2012

Some random thoughts on the Conference on Disarmament (CD) as delegations begin to write their speeches for the opening of the 2012 session of the Conference on 24 January:-

1 The last occasion on which the CD fulfilled the negotiating role given to it by the UN General Assembly was in 1996 when the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) emerged from an intensive three-year process. That was 16 years ago.

2 Leaving aside the unconsummated agreement of 29 May 2009, the last time that the CD was able to reach consensus on initiating its next negotiation was in August 1998 when it agreed to a mandate for a fissile material production ban. Those negotiations lasted less than a month. That was 14 years ago.

3 Since then the Conference has not been able to agree (except fleetingly in 2009) to get down to negotiations either on a fissile material production ban or on mandates for any of the other core items on its agenda – nuclear disarmament, security assurances, or preventing an arms race in outer space, or on anything else of substance.

4 How can this barren state of affairs be allowed to exist? How can the resources consumed by the 24-week annual sessions of the CD be put to better use? To whom should the CD be held accountable for those resources?

5 In 1978 the UN General Assembly’s first Special Session on Disarmament (UNSSOD I), when mandating the body that is known today as the CD, instructed the Conference to report to the Assembly annually. The CD duly does so. But given the continuing inability of the CD to be able to report the commencement of any negotiations, is the UNGA simply turning a blind eye to the situation?

6 Yes and no. The annual report to the UNGA is merely a procedural one. This is because the CD is unable to agree to spell out clearly why it is failing to carry out the negotiating role that the General Assembly expects of it. Notwithstanding the rules of procedure that stipulate that “reports must reflect faithfully the positions of all the members” (rule 25) , the Conference’s annual reports are of the lowest common denominator variety that are so often the consequence of decision-making not by voting but by consensus as is the case in the CD (rule 18).

7 But the UNGA can read between the lines of the CD’s report. This is because, of course, the CD’s 65 members are also members of the General Assembly. So too are the 40 or more observers of the CD. In any event, such is the level of concern of UN member states about the paralysis of the Conference, shared by the UN Secretary-General himself, that the Assembly has begun to put the CD on notice.

8 As noted earlier on this website , separate resolutions tabled during the most recent session of UNGA by Austria, Mexico and Norway (though not pressed to the vote) and by Canada have clearly sensitized the broader international community to a role for the Assembly this coming October if the CD remains deadlocked at that point.

9 And significantly the UNGA agreed without dissent on a resolution tabled by the Netherlands, South Africa and Switzerland that did two things. The resolution urged the CD to adopt and implement a programme of work to enable it to resume substantive work on its agenda early in its 2012 session, and it decided that at its next annual session it would “review progress made in the implementation of the present resolution and, if necessary, to further explore options for taking forward multilateral disarmament negotiations”. The parent body (UNGA), thus, is well seized of the situation surrounding its offspring (the CD).

10 What then are the options for the Conference, assuming that the status quo is without viability? One idea that has been pursued by Russia is to reprise the short-lived work programme of May 2009 with a small twist to get work underway on analysing the main elements of a fissile material treaty without actually branding that work as negotiations, while continuing substantive discussions on the three other key issues. The point at which “discussions” morph into “negotiations” is not, after all, some kind of confidence trick but an evolution in trust – a growing acceptance that the parameters in which compromise can be brokered have begun to emerge. This is in stark contrast to the current situation where, far from charting the way forward, the would-be participants are blocked even from any form of substantive engagement be it described as “discussions” or “negotiations”.

11 Another option is to simplify the programme of work, perhaps along the lines suggested recently on this website. This would involve returning to the successful formula of the distant past when the work programme served the purpose originally intended by the rules of procedure (rule 27) of being essentially procedural rather than substantive. That is, it would incorporate a schedule of its activities for that session, without trying also to specify mandates or other matters of substance.

12 Each of these options has the merit of breaking the ice that encases the CD, paving the way for re-building a measure of trust amongst members, trust that is a vital precondition to serious negotiations and thus to meeting the original expectations of the CD as spelled out by UNSSOD I. If that degree of trust is currently unobtainable, the CD may need to explore longer term options such as laying the foundations for an eventual negotiation by setting up an open-ended experts group of the kind that created the right conditions for the CTBT, discussed in an earlier posting on this site.

13 Whatever the way forward, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that in 2012 the future of the CD will be under the spotlight as never before. Clearly it will not be sufficient to continue merely to lament the constraints of the rules of procedure or the “absence of political will”. The rules can and must be used to facilitate rather than frustrate progress. It is essential to overcome not the absence of political will but the clash of wills that exists between those for whom the CD offers a channel for progress on issues of high international security and those for whom it has become a convenient parking place for those same issues. Will the destiny of the Conference be determined by its members or by its creator, the UN General Assembly? Time will tell soon enough.

This is a guest blog by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR.

(The symbol is drawn from the Microsoft Clip Art Gallery)

Conference on Disarmament: Some misconceptions

On the 10th anniversary of the UN Study on disarmament and non‐proliferation education, these comments are made in the spirit of disarmament education and in the hope that delegates to and observers of the crucial 2012 session of the Conference on Disarmament will find them helpful.

1. The CD – “a single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum”.

The notion of the CD as a single negotiating forum is much misunderstood and misquoted. Even the CD’s own annual resolution and report to the UN General Assembly (UNGA) gets it wrong. The most recent CD resolution tabled in the First Committee at UNGA66 mistakenly refers to the CD as “the sole multilateral disarmament negotiating forum” (emphasis added).

What’s in a word? What’s the difference between “single” and “sole”? Not much ordinarily, but “sole” has come to be used in some quarters as though the CD were the only legitimate multilateral disarmament negotiating forum. The use of the words “a single” was intended by the UN General Assembly to mean something else. This role was conferred on the CD by the UN General Assembly during its first Special Session on Disarmament (UNSSODI) in 1978. What the General Assembly had in mind was that the CD would be a single (as opposed to the sole) forum. That is, it would provide a single edifice within which key disarmament issues would be negotiated by key states as needs arose (assuming the necessary consensus – see further below). It was seen as more effective and efficient to support a single institution and maintain a single repository of knowledge and expertise than to take up disarmament issues, one by one, in an ad hoc manner.

The point about drawing a distinction between “a single” and “the sole” forum is that frustrated members of the CD need not be constrained in any way if they wish to move negotiations elsewhere: for example, to their own or other edifices or processes such as those used to negotiate the Ottawa and Oslo Conventions, or to the parent body of the CD – the UN General Assembly itself.

As a footnote, separate resolutions tabled during UNGA66 by Austria, Mexico and Norway (though not pressed to the vote) and by Canada have each sensitised the broader international community to a role for the UN General Assembly next October if the CD remains deadlocked at that point. The parent, thus, is well seized of the situation surrounding its offspring: the CD, in effect, is on the mat, if not quite yet on formal notice from the UNGA.

2. “Comprehensive and balanced”

The phrase “comprehensive and balanced” is often used in the CD to qualify the programme of work (or priorities) of the Conference, agreement on which has eluded the CD since 1998 except for a false dawn in 2009. The CD’s rules of procedure require that a programme of work must be established each annual session as the basis for the CD’s efforts for that year. But the rules do not require that that programme be “comprehensive and balanced” in those specific terms. There is certainly no need for the programme to be comprehensive (see further below), although it would need to be balanced as a practical element of the consensus necessary for concerted implementation of it.

3. “Programme of work”

The ingredients needed for a programme of work are the source of a damaging misunderstanding in the CD. Modern-day formulations of the programme of work embody mandates for subsidiary bodies/working groups to which the substantive work of the CD would be delegated for the remainder of the annual session. But writing these mandates into the work programme is not required by the rules of procedure (rule 28). Attempting to do so has proved a recipe for the current 13 year-long deadlock.

To be clear, mandates for subsidiary bodies do need to be agreed by the conference, but not in the work programme. But to return to the point. Under the CD’s rules, a work programme need be no more than a “schedule of activities” for the session – simply a timetable that sets out for planning purposes the dates for taking up individual agenda items and the periods of time to be allocated to each topic. It would also list other organizational matters that members wanted to address, such as allocating time to any high level segment and to the preparation of the annual report to the UN General Assembly. If the CD could unburden itself of its endless agonising over its programme of work by reverting to the successful formula of the past, perhaps the trust and confidence necessary for agreeing mandates and getting down to substantive work would ebb back into the Council Chamber. If not, the attraction of alternative processes will surely prove irresistible.

4. “Consensus”

There is no ambiguity in the rules of procedure about the manner of decision-making in the CD. UNSSODI expressed the need for the Conference to operate by consensus, and rule 18 reflects that position. But what does “consensus” mean? Rule 18 does not say that every member has a veto. It is clear from UNSSODI that the circumstances in which a member would object to a decision (i.e., break consensus) is when it believes that the ultimate product of the work of a subsidiary body has not emerged “in such an equitable and balanced manner as to ensure the right of each State to security”.

Short of a threat to national security, “consensus” should be interpreted in its normal manner. That is, decisions should be taken by general agreement where no member feels so discomforted by that decision as to impel it to voice its objection, thereby blocking the outcome. So, members might object to a decision to adopt a draft treaty on a certain topic, say fissile material, where it believed that the outcome, despite intensive negotiations in which it had participated, would prejudice its national security. At the other end of the spectrum, a member would not normally object to a decision to adopt, for example, a programme of work of the simplified kind outlined above even if that member’s “wish list” was not fully met. In other words, the consensus rule entails the exercise by each member of a level of responsibility informed by the likely impact of the decision on the security of that state, rather than by some unfettered freedom to exercise a veto. Indefinite blocking of decisions in the pre-negotiating stage of the CD’s work on a given topic serves only to reinforce doubts about the utility of the Conference.

Conclusion

These views are intended to encourage dialogue as part of an educative process. Bigger questions are whether these four areas of misinterpretation are accidental or deliberate, and why. In any event, their combined effect prevents the CD from operating in the manner intended by UNSSODI, freezing the opportunity to advance the causes of nuclear disarmament, to ban fissile material production, to achieve more extensive security assurances or to prevent an arms race in outer space, a least under the roof of the Conference on Disarmament. Is it any wonder that efforts to move issues from the CD to another process are intensifying? Please feel free to comment on possible ways forward.

This is a guest blog by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR. 



(The symbol is drawn from Google Clip Art Images)

CD: Breaking the ice

The rules of procedure of the Conference on Disarmament (CD) sometimes take on the appearance of a strait-jacket, tying the hands of member states and taking them hostage. But CD members as sovereign states are masters of their own destiny. Where collective will exists, a way forward will always present itself. And, as we shall see shortly, this has happened in the past.

The rules of procedure that guide the conduct of business of the Conference are a mix of direction and discretion. The central regulations are to be found in rules 18 and 19 (CD/8/Rev.9). Decisions are to be adopted by consensus, rather than by voting (rule 18). But the requirement that the work of the Conference shall be conducted in plenary meetings (rule 19) is coupled with an important discretion. This allows the CD to agree (by consensus) on additional arrangements, such as the holding of informal meetings with or without experts. Indeed, “whenever the Conference deems it advisable” the CD may also establish various types of subsidiary bodies whose rules of procedure do not necessarily have to reflect those of the Conference itself (rules 23 and 24).

These observations are made to reinforce the point that the CD’s rules – applied in good faith - need not tie the body in knots.

An article in the latest edition of UNIDIR’s periodical Disarmament Forum offers an interesting insight into an earlier decision of the Conference relating to the Comprehensive nuclear test ban treaty (CTBT), which, although it dates back to 1976 and to a predecessor of the CD, has lessons for today. On 22 July that year the Conference of the Committee on Disarmament established an Ad Hoc Group of Scientific Experts (GSE) “to consider international co-operative measures to detect and identify seismic events”. The chair of the GSE, Ola Dahlman, describes the open-ended mandate given to the ad hoc group as “unprecedented”.

The open-ended mandate was unprecedented on a number of counts, not least with respect to its very breadth and width. The mandate was groundbreaking also in the sense that until 1976 any ad hoc group more or less automatically had comprised all the members of the Conference. Moreover, ad hoc groups were usually mandated to conduct negotiations rather than to develop and test scientific aspects of a disarmament/non-proliferation measure. It was unprecedented in that, despite the reservations of Nigeria and Mexico of a north/south nature (see CCD/PV.714), there was no entrenched opposition to the idea because in the final analysis there was an acceptance that a workable CTBT would need to be underpinned by the outcome of the (western-dominated) GSE's efforts and expertise.

But the three remaining counts on which the GSE’s mandate are unprecedented are perhaps the most enlightening. The first is that the mandate was not limited in time; the Conference did not have to renew it every year as with other CD activities. Secondly, the GSE had a permanent and not a rotating chair, which meant that the group had a stable leadership and valuable continuity. Thirdly, the mandate – as has historically been the case in the CD – embraced a single, freestanding topic, without linkages to other issues but without precluding the taking up of mandates on other issues.

The work carried out by the GSE - some of it during the height of the Cold War - not only crucially underpinned the political negotiations of the CTBT but facilitated considerable transfer of seismic technology beyond the members of the group.

Curiously, the GSE was never formally disbanded. If there was a will to do so, its mandate could be refreshed by the CD and the Conference could set it to work on one or more core issues on its agenda. In any event, if members want the CD to be productive whether through preparatory phases in expert groups, pre-negotiations or full-scale engagement of any kind, there are ways of doing so other than via the failed approaches of the past decade.

This is a guest post by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR.

Also see this collection of discussion pieces by Tim Caughley on the disarmament machinery, and in particular, the CD. These pieces were first published on this blog.

Photo Credit: "Ice" by Tim Caughley.

Shannon Mandate , aged 15

On 24 March 2010, fifteen years will have elapsed since the “Shannon Mandate” was first tabled in the Conference on Disarmament (CD). That proposal for the negotiation of a ban on the production of fissile materials for nuclear weapons became the basis for programmes of work adopted by the CD in 1998 and again in 2009. But neither of those heady moments of consensus flourished.

Last year’s short-lived success was the subject of comment on this blog on 14 October. Since then, the procedural stalling tactics have continued. The Conference is held hostage not only in relation to fissile material negotiations. Core issues such as nuclear disarmament in general, negative security assurances and preventing an arms race in outer space are similarly on hold.

It is tempting to attribute a death wish to the Conference on Disarmament. Alternative forums or parallel processes in which real work can be undertaken on these topics, without the constraints of the CD’s rules of procedure, are now under active consideration.

The need to foster a favourable atmosphere for multilateral disarmament efforts in the next few weeks in the lead-up to a major, month-long review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) in May this year is just one consideration driving the idea of developing an alternative forum to the Conference on Disarmament.

Governments frustrated by the endless procedural wrangles in the CD have been reminded once again that the problems with the Conference’s rules of procedure are not confined to the frequency with which the consensus rule is misused. Rotating the presidency every four weeks (Rule 9) has been exposed repeatedly as an endemic weakness, eroding leadership and continuity especially where presidents are little known in the Council Chamber. The recent practice of encouraging the six presidents for the year to act collegially works only to the extent that the individuals concerned are able to participate in a sustained manner throughout the year.

More worrying is the fact that, notwithstanding this weakness, the bulk of the membership seems content to have the delicate consensus-forming activities devolved almost entirely to the presidency, seldom seeking detailed accounts of the endless consultations carried out behind the scenes on their behalf. The informal Plenary on 11 February represents a new and welcome departure in this regard, narrowing the scope for a tiny minority to draw things out behind the scenes. Even greater accountability would be achieved if civil society were allowed to be present.

Finally, persistence with a literal interpretation of the rule that the Conference shall establish its programme of work annually (Rule 28) is perhaps the most damning indictment of the CD’s faltering existence. Without repeating the discussion of that provision on this blog, the CD’s inability to place this requirement into context is puzzling to say the least.

No international conference that wants to work has ever been prevented from doing so by its rules of procedure – such an outcome would demean everybody. If the CD’s rules cannot be amended or applied sensibly, maybe a more radical approach should be taken. Perhaps, the rule or rules in question should be made to work, rather than written off.

In the case of Rule 28, let’s accept that the work programme has a limited life. Because it has only a limited life, let’s not try to invest it with complex mandates with which its working groups would be tasked. Short and simple. Let’s bring back into its rightful place Rule 19 according to which the “work of the Conference shall be conducted in plenary meetings”. If any additional arrangements are needed, e.g., subsidiary bodies, they can be agreed by the Conference (Rule 19 also).

What will the plenary meetings do? Just what the members want, i.e., a focused engagement, intensifying – if engagement is sustained – into negotiations. If engagement on a given topic cannot be sustained, then obviously no instrument, binding or otherwise, will emerge.

But what about continuity, given Rule 9 (see above)? As soon as continuity becomes important for any of the topics – that is, as soon as the focused engagement intensifies to the point of becoming a negotiation – it will be time to form a subsidiary body and select a chair.

What exactly will the programme of work say? The programme would allocate specified periods of time (perhaps a week) for dealing with each of the four core issues in plenary and, if necessary a further, single week for covering the three other subjects. This pattern would be repeated until either the list of speakers on an issue dwindled to the point that the plenary sessions devoted to that subject could be re-allocated or agreement was reached on forming a subsidiary body for that topic.

Such a programme, to repeat, would not prescribe mandates but, based on Rule 19, would utilize plenary meetings in accordance with a “schedule” – see Rule 20 – agreed upon by members.

Mandates may be useful in encapsulating agreement on organizational aspects, e.g., the need for a subsidiary body to report to plenary. But, as the CD has seen, mandates have their limitations in ring-fencing matters of substance. The question is one of support.

Success in pursuing an issue, say inclusion of pre-existing stocks in a fissile material negotiation, will depend on the level of support secured by the proponent (which, in fact, is already plentiful). Success in achieving coverage of pre-existing stocks in the final product of the negotiation will depend, likewise, on sustaining support sufficiently to be treated as a factor in the final compromise. And, if in the end the proponent finds itself isolated, no government can be forced to sign or become bound by a treaty, which it considers prejudicial to its essential security interests.

Fifteen years after the birth of the “Shannon Mandate”, fissile material negotiations remain rooted to the spot, defying the UN General Assembly which adopted without opposition Resolution A/RES/64/29 of 2 December last year, urging the Conference on Disarmament “to agree early in 2010 on a programme of work that includes the immediate commencement of negotiations on a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices”.

If the simpler, disaggregated approach to agreeing a work programme outlined earlier does not appeal, maybe an even simpler, disaggregated approach outside the CD will emerge, one in which outcomes are achieved through engagement on substance, not blocked by procedure.

This is a guest post by Tim Caughley. Tim is a Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR.

Photo Credit: "Day #12 Birthday Cake" by allieee on Flickr.

The CD lives again, but let history not repeat itself !

29 May 2009 was a red-letter day in the Conference on Disarmament. The Conference has secured a new lease of life. Its future must be informed by its past.

Just over 30 years ago, the UN General Assembly held a special session devoted to disarmament. It saw the need for a “single multilateral disarmament negotiating forum of limited size taking decisions on the basis of consensus”, i.e., without voting. This Geneva-based body became the Conference on Disarmament (CD) comprised now of 65 states.

Important treaties emerged from the CD, culminating in the Comprehensive Test Ban agreement in 1996. Since then, the CD has failed to agree – with one exception – even on a mandate to negotiate a treaty, let alone a treaty itself. Meanwhile several disarmament treaties have emerged from processes other than the CD. Conventions banning anti-personnel landmines and cluster munitions were agreed in negotiations that were purposely conducted by like-minded states outside of another consensus-observing process, the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW).

Until May of this year, the CD’s last decision to negotiate on substance (on a treaty prohibiting the production of fissile material, a key ingredient of nuclear weapons) occurred late in 1998. That decision was short-lived, however. In 1999 the Conference failed to agree to renew that mandate. A decade-long deadlock followed.

In the face of growing concerns about its future, concerted efforts were made to raise the political profile of the Conference. Since the beginning of last year, senior political figures from almost half the CD’s membership have come to Geneva to urge the Conference to resolve entrenched differences over its priorities and get back to work. The UN Secretary-General personally attended twice in that period to reinforce those exhortations. So too has the Russian Foreign Minister whose latest CD address, extraordinarily enough, took place on a Saturday early this March. Something was afoot.

And so it has proved. On 29 May, on his last day as president, Ambassador Idriss Jazaïry of Algeria, gavelled through a decision that ended an empty decade in the Conference. The loud and lingering applause that greeted the decision reflected a range of emotions. Sheer relief that the long drought had been broken. Relief, too, that this institution had seemingly been spared, as the president said, irrelevancy. Delight with the manner in which Amb Jazaïry had so skilfully engineered the breakthrough.

There was more sobering recognition, also, that the taking of this decision (CD/1863) was just the beginning of things. It will require more than a new spirit of multilateralism to make this delicate compromise work. Delegations will have to get used to spending virtually the entire week in the Council Chamber (the CD’s venerable meeting room) rather than the occasional day. They will need to deepen considerably their involvement in the complexities of the issues, calling on extra support where they can from capitals. Many of them will be anxious about tackling a work programme that embodies not just one major issue but four – a fissile material production ban, security assurances, nuclear disarmament and preventing an arms race in outer space.

Throughout these past barren years, CD members have frequently voiced, like a mantra, the Conference’s role as the world’s single disarmament negotiating body. It would seem to follow that the eyes of the international community, if not CD members themselves, will be on the topic of a fissile material production ban, the sole issue amongst the four that enjoys a negotiating mandate.

In any event, the decision of 29 May has raised widespread expectations that the Conference will, in due course, embellish its fine history with a new and vital treaty or treaties of comparable significance to its past products, the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) , and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). It is imperative that the efforts of the Conference to set up and sustain the necessary Working Groups that will implement this decision enjoy universal political and public support from the outset.

Certainly, the decision has attracted international acclaim at the levels both of political leaders and civil society. And in terms of the new political profile of the Conference, it cannot have escaped the notice of all who continued to believe in the CD that amongst those who welcomed the event of 29 May was the US President himself in a press statement that same day heralding what, surely, will be a new beginning for the Conference.

The CD’s decision is entitled “Draft Decision for the establishment of a Programme of Work for the 2009 session”. International disappointment if the decision is literally confined to the CD’s 2009 session will be as palpable as the relief that surrounded the extraordinary breakthrough of 29 May. Will the new political and public profile that the Conference now enjoys insure it against the fate of the short-lived predecessor to CD/1683 almost eleven years ago? Let history not repeat itself.


This is a guest blog by Tim Caughley. Tim is Resident Senior Fellow at UNIDIR.

Photo credit: courtesy of Mary Wareham.

The tip of the iceberg

As regular readers of the blog may have gathered, I've been working this year on a history of international efforts to address the humanitarian impacts of cluster munitions.

This history, to be published before the end of the year, focuses in particular on the Oslo process, which culminated in a Convention on Cluster Munitions in negotiations in Dublin in May 2008. But it also casts an eye much further back to the origins of international cluster munition work, which date from the Swiss Diplomatic Conferences in the 1970s and proposals there by Sweden and others to prohibit "cluster warheads".

Chronologically speaking, the Oslo process, which ran for approximately 15 months from February 2007 until the end of May 2008, was just the tip of the iceberg. There was a lot more under the surface. Concerns had been raised about the hazards cluster munitions pose to civilians both at time of use and post-conflict for many, many years by governments and NGOs. My impression is that this isn't necessarily widely understood when multilateral practitioners think about lessons to be learned (or not) from recent international efforts on cluster munitions. Nor is the question it poses but which is often not raised: why did the Oslo process get traction when previous efforts failed?

The easy thing to do would be to point to the 2006 summer war in Southern Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah and the massive use of cluster munitions there as the catalyst. Others disagree: Virgil Wiebe, for instance, whose posts have graced this blog in the past, feels strongly that the Lebanon conflict was "necessary but not sufficient". Certainly, determination among Norwegian policy makers to get an international process going on a treaty to ban cluster munitions that cause unacceptable harm to civilians pre-dated Lebanon. And NGOs in the Cluster Munition Coalition had been preparing for a break with the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons' talks in late 2006 unless its five-yearly review conference agreed on more meaningful work to restrict the weapon. So clearly the picture is more complex than it first appears.

The deeper I got into research for the history, the more convinced I became that it's difficult to draw useful lessons about the Oslo process for future 'humanitarian disarmament' endeavours without having this historical context. Fortunately, Eric Prokosch's classic book 'The Technology of Killing: A Military and Political History of Anti-Personnel Weapons' (Zed Books, 1995) is an excellent resource. (This book is unfortunately out of print, but second-hand copies can be scrounged via the internet and second-hand bookshops, and should be required reading for all Geneva multilateral diplomats, in my view.) Eric also has been very kind in sharing his insights in the course of my research about how cluster munition-related concerns evolved from their early days.

Such perspectives are important. Many of the other people I've interviewed and conversed with in the course of writing my book have quite reasonably drawn their own conclusions about what we can learn from international efforts on cluster munitions, but most do so based on their impressions of events this decade. However, if one only looks at the last few years the achievement of the cluster munition ban treaty might have looked simply spontaneous, and even easy - even though it was neither.

The impact of the Ottawa process on anti-personnel mines in the 1990s and the resulting 1997 Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention also needs to be considered. There are many similarities between the Ottawa and Oslo processes, and the former's example was at the very least a major inspiration to most of those centrally involved in the Oslo process. But again, context is important. A two-day seminar we convened in November last year with various multilateral practitioners on lessons learned from the Ottawa and Oslo processes underlined that there are divergent viewpoints on what kind of 'model' that the most obvious similarities between the two processes offer, or whether they constitute a model at all. (These similarities include free-standing activity outside traditional UN forums propelled by like-mindedness rather than universal participation, government-civil society partnership, and emphasis on humanitarian perspectives.)

The British historian Hew Strachan recently wrote in the journal Survival with regard to the Iraq war that "As history is turned into political science, it makes a casualty of contingency". It's a phrase I have written on my office whiteboard as a continual reminder. The most elegant international relations theories don't convincingly account (in my mind at least) for the role of individuals in the Oslo process. If anything is really clear to me, however, it's that individuals were key to that success.

I'm pondering all of this as I prepare to write my concluding chapter of the draft manuscript after a week off. Earlier this year, I related the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami's comment that writing books is a bit like marathon running. I'm looking for my second wind!

John Borrie

Image credit: photo-montage of an iceberge from Wikipedia.org.