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Disarmament Commission: Three-Week Session Fails to Reach Consensus By Jim Wurst The items this year were “ways and means to achieve nuclear disarmament” and “practical confidence-building measures in the field of conventional arms.” The commission began as it started — with two working papers drafted by the commission’s chairmen that contained long lists of initiatives but did not enjoy any consensus. The rapporteur of the commission, Mehiedine al-Kadiri, said the failure to reach consensus “owes more to the complexity of the issues and not to the political will of states.” The commission works only by consensus. Both items were in their third years on the agenda. According to the commission’s rules, an item is dropped after three years. Toward the end of the year, the commission will meet to discuss which items to place on its 2004 agenda. The commission is a deliberative body of the General Assembly that establishes guidelines, or “disarmament norms,” as the commission’s chairman, Italian Ambassador Mario Maiolini, and others call them. It differs from the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in that the Geneva conference is empowered to negotiate legally binding treaties, such as the Chemical Weapons Convention, while the commission’s guidelines serve only as voluntary recommendations (see GSN, Feb. 18). The nuclear disarmament working paper lists a number of “general principles,” including “the ultimate objective of the efforts of states in the disarmament process is general and complete disarmament under effective international control,” “the importance of full and effective implementation by all states parties” to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, “all appropriate measures consistent with international law aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons,” and the “urgency” of resuming substantive work at the Conference on Disarmament. The working paper on conventional arms details ways to strengthen and broaden existing confidence-building measures, such as the U.N. Register on Conventional Arms, and encourages the creation of new confidence-building measures on the regional and bilateral levels. “The ultimate goals of CBMs in the field of conventional arms are to strengthen international peace and security, to improve relations among states, to promote the social, economic and cultural well being of their peoples, and to contribute to the prevention of war,” the paper says. In the past, the commission has produced guidelines on the transfer of conventional arms and on the creation of nuclear weapon-free zones. The last guidelines agreed to by the commission were in 1999.
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