States Parties 161 States Not Party 36
Delivered by Sylvie Brigot, ICBL Advocacy Director
Madame Chair,
As reported in the Zagreb Progress Report, the ICBL has undertaken a lot of activities since the Nairobi Summit. We focussed our work on regions where the level of adherence to the Convention remains low, essentially Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and the CIS.
We undertook a series of advocacy missions to meet with high level representatives of the following countries: Azerbaiajn, Bahrain, China, Georgia, Indonesia, Libya, Mongolia and Singapore. In the course of our missions, we also met with Civil Society of these countries, as well as representatives of States Parties, the Red Cross and Red Crescent movement and the United Nations to mobilise all stakeholders at the national level.
National Campaigns, in those states that have not yet joined the Convention, have sustained their effort to convince their governement to adhere to it. In these efforts we have closely worked in collaboration with members of the Universalisation Contact Group, and particularly its Chair Canada. The active work of the Universalisation Contact Group is vital to strategically promote the Convention and take action on actions number 1 to 8 of the Nairobi Action Plan. However, we are concerned that the spirit of activism of the Convention, where States Parties truly wanted to be involved in promoting the Treaty, is beginning to wane. We call on all States Parties to rededicate themselves, not only to its full implementation domestically, but to universalise it throughout the world.
We welcome the accession to the Convention by Vanuatu, Latvia and Bhutan. We are disappointed to see that despite unanimous domestic ratification, Ukraine has still not yet deposited its instrument of ratification. We hope that Poland will have ratified before the next Standing Committee Meetings. We were hoping that Haiti would have finalised its ratification, as it seems to be really a question of sending the document to New York. We regret that despite promising announcement last year, Brunei does not seem to have included ratification of the Convention in the agenda of its Parliamentary session this year and that the process in Indonesia has stalled due to other priorities and circumstances. We believe that progress could easily been done when it comes to the status of signatory states, and we hope all seven signatories would be States Parties by the 7th Meeting of States Parties.
Madame Chair, the bad news is that only 3 states joined the Convention in 2004, and 3 in 2005 and among them, no major stockpiles holder, and only 1 mine affected State. In addition, while we are making progress in engaging more governments to come on board, use by non-state actors became an ever greater proportion of the landmine problem worldwide, as documented by Landmine Monitor. The work currently being done to engage armed groups to renounce the use of antipersonnel landmines and collaborate in mine action should be even more supported.
The good news is that more and more states seem poised to join, as the recent vote at the First Committee of the UNGA demonstrated. But experience as shown that it is crucial to follow up and follow up again. It is now up to States Parties to ensure these positive indications come to fruition.
