The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
The NPT Review Conference 2005: Acronym Special Coverage
Day 22: texts start rolling towards Friday
May 23, 2005
Rebecca Johnson
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The start of the final week: as requested by the President of
the NPT Review Conference, Ambassador Sergio Duarte of Brazil, the
Chairs of the various committees have circulated their first
drafts. Any meetings still open were then declared informal, which
means that the ensuing discussions are deemed too sensitive for the
sheltered ears of civil society. Since the UN is now wired, we set
up our laptops among the clouds of smoke in the Vienna café,
purloined (or more likely were given) copies of the chairs' first
drafts, read them... and groaned. How different from 2000 when
there was the political will to push for something both real and
realisable and the corridors were buzzing with ideas, arguments and
energy.
Not all the Chairs' efforts meet the President's requirement of
"short and concise and yet balanced and comprehensive", but that is
not the central problem. Self censorship and restricted horizons
have prevailed, such is the lack of hope of achieving anything that
substantially builds in any way on the agreements of 1995 and 2000.
Even so, it is unlikely that these uninspiring pages will get far,
because some want to go even lower and slide even further backwards
than these attempts to find a lowest common denominator.
In past Review Conferences the Acronym Institute and other NGOs
worked hard to sift through the mountains of documents, statements
and working papers and to summarise and highlight elements that
would contribute towards a constructive outcome or move debates
forward for work in the future. We dealt with closed doors,
over-zealous security guards and officious bureaucracy and wrote
into the early hours night after night because there was something
to aim towards. And because it seemed to matter.
It should still matter, because the NPT is meant to help us prevent one of
the worst threats we can imagine - nuclear bombs exploding and destroying
our homes and lives. And the Review Conference is meant to strengthen
the treaty, to help us learn from mistakes and be more effective at implementing
the obligations and agreements already undertaken. But down in the basement
where the sun doesn't shine, the urgency of preventing the use of nuclear
weapons seems to have been forgotten. This is a conference that has been
going through the motions since Day 1, and it is not an edifying sight.
Though there are some good ideas in the many working papers, they got
quickly lost amid the low expectations. They will have to wait until after
this conference to be properly critiqued, in the hope that some of the
ideas get picked up and worked on in the context of bilateral, plurilateral
and multilateral negotiations that will need to be reinvigorated and encouraged.
Day 22 Addendum:
Another mystery text has appeared in the conference rooms and on the
tables at the NPT Review Conference. Again no identifier, but it appears
to be a tracked and marked amended version of the rolling text language
from the various chairs.
To view this mystery amended text as a pdf file, see http://www.acronym.org.uk/npt/may24.pdf.
23.5.05
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© 2005 The Acronym Institute.
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