Ten Years On: History in the making

Landmark report recommends to the UN to negotiate a nuclearban

On 19 August 2016 a UN Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) fell into disarray, as one country insisted on taking a vote. The translators had gone home and the delegates had to move into a smaller room as the larger one was no longer available. The clock had been stopped, to allow the OEWG to reach a conclusion. I myself had cancelled my flight to stay to the end. This is what happened.

It was a Friday evening in Geneva. I was sitting in the NGO gallery of Salle XIX in the Palais des Nation when it became clear that the text that most delegates believed had been agreed as a consensus document was not going to be adopted, My colleague and I looked at each other, realising that we either had to forgo the end of these negotiations, or we had to cancel our flight in two hours time. Even though we had no idea where we would spend the night, we cancelled the flight and booked a new one for the next day.

At first, it appeared that the participating countries would agree on a consensus document. The text had not come easy; the delegations were in a third session that had begun on 5 August 2016, and in the final days negotiations had taken place in ever smaller groups, behind closed doors. Despite their dissatisfaction with the outcome—which they felt did not go far enough—many countries were prepared to vote in favour of the text. Still the document contained the words “widespread support” for beginning negotiations on a treaty to prohibit nuclear weapons in 2017. However, Australia and 13 other countries refused to endorse the document. Acting alone, Australia called for a vote.

The moment it became clear that there would be a showdown vote, Guatemala submitted an amendment that significantly strengthened the wording of the OEWG’s final report. Instead of merely noting that there is “a widely supported recommendation,” the OEWG could now explicitly call on the UNGA to convene a negotiating conference, “which is open to all states and involves the participation and engagement of international organizations and civil society, to negotiate a legally binding instrument for the prohibition of nuclear weapons leading to their complete elimination, as stated in paragraph 34 of [this paper].” This meant that the delegates no longer had to vote on a watered-down document they were not fully happy with, but could vote for one that unequivocally recommended to the UN General Assembly that negotiations should begin in 2017.

Before the vote took place, we were told that time had run out and we would all need to move to another room, allowing the translators to end their long day and go home. The clock would be stopped, as is the tradition when a negotiating conference is near a conclusion but not quite there yet. The Chair has the prerogative to freeze time, as it were. The government and NGO delegates crammed into a much smaller room, mixing together at long tables that were no longer marked to distinguish between states or civil society.

The vote took place using name cards. The Chair, Ambassador Thani Thongphakdi of Thailand, called out for or against and the delegates raised their cards bearing the name of their state. Counting took place manually, instead of the usual electronic method.

68 countries took a stand on 19 August 2016 in the UN in Geneva for a ban and outvoted a small group of 22 countries that continued to adhere to nuclear deterrence. 13 countries abstained.

After the vote, there was speculation as to why Australia, after days of wrangling over a consensus, had jeopardized the agreement. In doing so, the Australian ambassador provoked only one thing: an amendment and a more strongly-worded report.

The smaller group’s rejection was mentioned in the final report: “Other states [listed in a footnote as 24 states] did not agree with the above-mentioned recommendation and recommend that any process for multilateral nuclear disarmament negotiations must address national, international, and collective security concerns…”

The vote forced by Australia divided opponents of the nuclear weapons ban. Some states in the group had not wanted a vote—such as Germany and Japan. The vote made their opposition to the nuclear weapons ban visible, and because a majority of the public supported a nuclear weapons ban, they were put in a difficult position to explain their stance.

The process of going through the United Nations to arrive at negotiations was important to keep as many countries on board as possible. The failure of the NPT Review Conference in 2015 to advance any further on closing what Austria had termed „the legal gap“ after a series of groundbreaking conferences on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons led to the decision of the UNGA to hold an OEWG to address concrete and effective legal provisions and norms that would need to be concluded to attain and maintain a world without nuclear weapons.

It is now widely held that this day marked a substantial breakthrough in multilateral disarmament. In adopting a landmark report recommending the negotiation of a nuclear ban treaty this UN subsidiary body paved the way to the vote to negotiate a treaty in the UNGA later in 2016, and ultimately to the historic adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) on 7 July 2017.

Verbatim: Final Report of the Open-Ended Working Group “Taking forward multilateral nuclear nisarmament negotiations“, 19 August 2016

Further reading:

UNIDIR: Taking Forward Multilateral Nuclear Disarmament Negotiations. The 2016 Open-Ended Working Group, UNIDIR Resources, 11 Oct 2016