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Rebecca Johnson
Back to the main page on the NPT
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
© 2005 The Acronym Institute.