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Conference on Disarmament
Openning Statement for 2008 session
Statement by HE Ms Caroline Millar
Ambassador for Disarmament and Permanent Representative to the United Nations
29 January 2008
Mr President
The Australian delegation congratulates you on your Presidency of the Conference on Disarmament.
We offer you and your fellow Presidents our full cooperation with your efforts to guide our work to a successful conclusion.
At the very least, we hope that this Conference will make a substantive start on its mandate to negotiate.
For it is high time that it did.
The reality is that this Conference has achieved very little in the past decade.
To be sure we have discussed, debated, deliberated, questioned and argued some of the most important security challenges facing the international community.
We have ‘talked the talk’, and yet, all the while, the expectations of our communities have seemingly far outgrown the capacity of this body to meet them.
Mr President, it’s time we ‘walked the walk’… time we fulfilled this Conference’s negotiating mandate…time that we met the expectations of the international community.
Australia thus wholeheartedly endorses the UN Secretary General’s call for the Conference to resume its substantive work on the basis of L.1.
The balanced and carefully crafted Presidential Decision encompassed in L.1 and accompanying documents is a fair and just basis for our work.
It is born of a painstaking and comprehensive consultation, evaluation and revision by the 2007 Presidents.
And it remains the most realistic opportunity through which we can make the progress the international community has sought for more than a decade.
Mr President
The L.1 Presidential Decision sets out vital goals and a means of achieving them.
The negotiation of a treaty banning the production of fissile material for nuclear weapons and other explosive devices is of the utmost importance to Australia.
Such a treaty is an essential and practical contribution to global nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.
In Australia’s view, an FMCT would encompass key elements including:
. a commitment to prohibit the production of highly enriched uranium and separated plutonium for nuclear weapons
. appropriate measures to ensure adequate national implementation of the Treaty, as well as periodic review of this work
. and appropriate measures to ensure effective verification of States’ implementation of their commitments.
Australia acknowledges that its view is not the only view of an FMCT; that there will need to be a negotiation leading to the final outcome.
In this regard, Australia welcomes the mandate for negotiations set out in L.1.
Far from pre-empting the negotiations, it facilitates these by ensuring opportunity for all positions – be they on verification, stocks or other issues – to be scrutinised and tested as can only be done in a genuine negotiation.
Mr President
L.1 provides a realistic basis for substantive work on other issues in our agenda, taking into account the negotiating capacity of this forum and the relative level of development of these issues.
Nuclear disarmament is a high priority for the Australian Government and people.
Australia thus welcomes the efforts of some nuclear weapon states to reduce their nuclear arsenals and the degree of transparency afforded thus far.
But we urge the nuclear weapon states – and other states holding nuclear weapons – to make deeper, faster and irreversible cuts to all types of nuclear weapons – and to do so with even greater transparency.
For it is you, the states possessing nuclear weapons, that bear the greatest responsibility – and the greatest capacity – for making substantive progress towards nuclear disarmament.
This is not to say that the responsibility for nuclear disarmament is yours alone. It is not.
Non-nuclear weapons states must ensure their actions contribute to ensuring an environment conducive to nuclear disarmament.
They can do so in part by living up to their end of the NPT bargain through full commitment to and implementation of their non-proliferation obligations.
And together, nuclear weapons states and non-nuclear weapons states should use the L.1 mandate as an opportunity for this Conference to contribute to strengthening the process and pace of nuclear disarmament.
Mr President
Our discussions of security assurances over the past two years, while less intense than on other issues, have nonetheless reinforced this issue as one of continuing concern.
There is a need – one accommodated amply by L.1 – to focus discussion on practical measures to enable the provision of such assurances.
In this regard, Australia attaches great importance to the development of Nuclear Weapon Free Zones, freely arrived at among the states of the region concerned.
Such zones can be an effective means by which negative security assurances can be provided to non-nuclear weapon states parties to the NPT.
Australia first proposed a nuclear-weapon-free zone for the South Pacific in 1983, which was subsequently realized through the 1985 Treaty of Rarotonga establishing the South Pacific Nuclear Weapon Free Zone.
In this regard, Australia is very fortunate. But we acknowledge that other regions face even greater challenges to formulating NWFZs.
Australia reiterates its support for the establishment of nuclear weapon free zones in other regions, including the Middle East and Africa.
And we trust that our discussions under L.1 can yield practical advancement in these regions.
Mr President
Australia firmly believes that all nations have a right to unhindered access to outer space for peaceful purposes.
States should avoid taking actions that jeopardise such access, or which might put at risk the manned or unmanned space assets of other nations.
The L.1 proposal provides a good opportunity for us to consider ways and means to increase transparency and confidence in the space-faring actions of each other.
In doing so, we should be mindful that this Conference is not alone.
We should consider how we can best contribute to the work undertaken in other forums to ensure unhindered access to space by all nations.
Australia looks forward to discussion of various proposals, including the foreshadowed treaty on preventing the placement of weapons in outer space, under the L.1 mandate.
Our hope would be that this Conference could identify practical means by which to strengthen the international community’s confidence in the peaceful intent of all space-faring nations.
Mr President
Australia remains committed to seeing this Conference return to work. We can support the L.1 proposal. We can accept the accompanying clarifying statements.
But what we find very difficult to accept is the prospect that this Conference will again fail to fulfil its mandate, that it will again fail our peoples.
For it is not acceptable by any standard that the world’s principal forum for negotiation on arms control and disarmament remain idle for so long…
…all the more so when, as the UN Secretary General made clear to us last week, it is the clear will of the overwhelming majority of nations in this chamber and beyond that we take action.
I thank you.