Disarmament has been in the news this month.
The Nobel Peace Prize was awarded this year to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, calling attention to the important initiative of the United Nations to locate and destroy the chemical weapons that have already been used during the civil war in Syria. The UN initiative was born of an agreement between the United States and Russia which avoided, at least for the time being, a major escalation of that war.
Other international agencies have renewed the call for the signing and ratification of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Convention was adopted by the UN General Assembly in 1992, but has yet to be fully implemented by many major countries. Of special importance in the renewed campaign is the involvment of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, which is composed of parliamentarians from around the world. More than 40 Speakers of Parliament took part in their recent general assembly meeting which put a great emphasis on non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
There is also an increasing criticism of drones, the unmanned airplanes being used by the United States to regularly bomb countries in the Middle East and South Asia.
One does not see much progress on disarmament of nuclear weapons. The International Peace Bureau recently completed and reported on a survey of 172 countries on their national measures and unilateral efforts toward disarmament. Only eight countries bothered to respond. None of the nuclear powers responded, which prompted the researcher for the report to conclude that "It is counter intuitive that a state would educate its own population to question its sovereign prerogatives, and the author was not optimistic of finding a genuine disarmament education program run by a state."
|
VIDEOS |
French Spanish |
There is also not much progress on ratification by Member States of the arms trade treaty that was adopted this April by the UN General Assembly (See May bulletin of CPNN). As of now the UN website reports that it has been ratified by only 8 countries, and according to news reports, many senators in the United States have said they will not allow ratification by that country.
Meanwhile, civil society organizations, especially those on the political left, continue to try to push for nuclear disarmament in the Middle East. Following the failure of states to attend last year's meeting that had been scheduled for Helsinki (See CPNN, December 24, 2012), there is now a call for a meeting of civil society in Israel with the theme, "For a Nuclear Weapons and Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone in the Middle East.
Now for some good news. Following up the theme of the June CPNN bulletin, you may have noticed that a majority of CPNN articles this month come from CPNN reporters, 41 in fact. As a result there is a much higher volume of stories than in the past, now almost two a day!
Most of the reporters this month are from Europe and North America. However, in order to better reflect the Global Movement, the Culture of Peace News network needs more reporters from other regions as well.
