Flooding South Lebanon - Human Rights Watch

assistance, risk education, and stockpile destruction. 376 At follow-on meetings in
Lima, Peru, from May 23 to 25, 2007, and Vienna, Austria, from December 5 to 7, an
additional 48 states joined the process. States discussed a draft treaty text and
reached broad agreement on the framework for and essential elements of the treaty.
They are still debating about what the definition of cluster munition should
encompass. 377 Human Rights Watch and the Cluster Munition Coalition have stressed
that the starting point should be that all cluster munitions cause unacceptable harm
to civilians, and that the burden of proof must be on governments to demonstrate
that any particular weapon should be exempted from the prohibition. Israel has not
participated in this process, but Lebanon has been extremely active and supportive.
Meetings to develop further and negotiate the treaty have been set for Wellington,
New Zealand (February 18-22, 2008), and Dublin, Ireland (May 19-30, 2008), with a
signing ceremony planned for Oslo later in the year. “We have given ourselves a
strict timeline to conclude our work by 2008. This is ambitious but necessary to
respond to the urgency of this humanitarian problem,” said Norway’s Foreign
Minister Jonas Ghar Støre. 378
In the meantime, in November 2007, states parties to CCW rejected a European
Union proposal to negotiate a new protocol banning cluster munitions that cause
unacceptable harm to civilians, and instead only agreed to a weak, vague mandate
to “negotiate a proposal to address urgently the humanitarian impact of cluster
munitions, while striking a balance between military and humanitarian
considerations.” The mandate does not specify that negotiations should lead to a
new legally binding instrument or include any kind of prohibition. It also does not
have a timeline. Given the CCW’s refusal to deal with this issue over the past five
years, its consensus approach in which the lowest common denominator prevails,
and the stated opposition to any prohibition by countries such as China, Russia, and
376 Oslo Conference on Cluster Munitions, “Declaration.”
377 A draft definition developed by Human Rights Watch and the Cluster Munition Coalition is available at:
www.stopclustermunitions.org.
378 “Cluster Munitions to Be Banned by 2008,” Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs press release.
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