Group fails to weaken cluster munition treaty

A group  of mainly Western industrialised countries has failed in efforts to water down a draft global convention to ban cluster munitions.

During the fourth day of a major international treaty conference in Wellington yesterday, 500 delegates from 122 countries were told that a draft treaty would not be amended.

A small group of countries - Britain, Australia, Germany, France, Canada and Japan - lobbied for changes to the treaty. They argued for implementation of the treaty to be delayed up to 10 years, exemptions for certain weapons and changes to the treaty to allow their armed forces to continue to operate with countries that use cluster munitions.

But the conference chairman, New Zealand disarmament ambassador Don MacKay, made it clear to the plenary session yesterday that the draft treaty would go forward without amendment to a final diplomatic conference in Dublin in May, where the anti-cluster munition convention will finally be adopted.

He said there were still differences of view on the questions of defining cluster munitions, transition periods and interoperability, but good progress had been made and a lot of momentum for a new convention had been generated.

In a move to placate countries that wanted changes, he offered to forward their statements in a compendium to the draft treaty.

Cluster Munitions Coalition coordinator Thomas Nash said it was clear that attempts to weaken the treaty had failed. He said the coalition, which had 160 delegates at the conference, was pleased. "The direction we're going in now is very much towards what I would call a comprehensive prohibition, which has been the goal of this process.

"We've come from a situation at the beginning of the week to a situation where we can now confidently say a draft treaty text will go unchanged to Dublin."

Major arms manufacturing countries including the United States, Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Israel were absent from the conference but proponents of the convention believe the treaty will discourage them from using cluster munitions.