Can the Necessary International Legal Framework to Achieve a Nuclear-WeaponFree World Be Reached?

At the negotiations of the First Committee, Austria tabled a resolution which was sponsored by around 50 countries, led by Brazil, Ireland, Mexico, Nigeria and South Africa. It was passed by a majority of the votes on 27 October (123 in favor, 38 against, 16 abstentions). Out of nine nuclear-weapon states the DPRK surprisingly voted in favour of the resolution, the People’s Republic of China, India and Pakistan abstained and the rest of the nuclear-weapon states (France, Israel, the Russian Federation, Great Britain and the USA) voted against it. The Netherlands set itself apart from the negative voting of the allied non-nuclear weapon states by abstaining.1 Further voting on this and other resolutions by all six committees will take place at a plenary meeting of the UN General Assembly at the end of this year. It can be expected that the voting result of the above mentioned resolution will not be significantly different from the previous one of the First Committee.

Long-term stagnation in the main disarmament forums

If we look at the issue of nuclear disarmament from the point of view of the development of multilateral disarmament negotiations at the main forums of the disarmament apparatus (the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, the UN Disarmament Commission, the First Committee of the UN General Assembly and the review process of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons) the situation is rather dismal. Given the principle of consensus decision-making, including consensus decision-making on proposed agreements, which applies to all negotiation forums, with the exception of the First Committee and also given the lack of political will and unwillingness to reach a compromise in the results on the side of nuclear-weapon powers, the multilateral disarmament negotiations process of these bodies has stagnated for the past several years. At the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, which is the most important body with a mandate for negotiating disarmament agreements, all action has been blocked for the last twenty years. In contrast to other types of weapons of mass destruction, that is chemical and biological weapons, which are banned by relevant conventions in the long-term, there is no similar international legal instrument for the much more destructive nuclear weapons. Yet, when they discuss the issue of nuclear weapons and disarmament, all of the representatives of both nuclear-weapon and non-nuclear-weapon states simultaneously support the creation of a nuclear-weapon-free world and, in this context, they sometimes recall the “Prague speech” of US President Barack Obama in April 2009, in which he unequivocally supported this goal...