At a UN conference Denmark has rejected a proposal to allow the use of cluster munitions.
This weekend, international negotiators failed to reach agreement on the proposal. Denmark aligned itself with nearly 50 other nations opposed to the wording.
Head of DanChurchAid’s Mine Action team, Richard MacCormac, is delighted.
“Allowing use of weapons produced after 1980 does nothing to rid the world of the horrors of these weapons. Denmark has made the correct decision to reject the wording, and uphold the much more strongly worded Convention on Cluster Munitions. We applaud that decision”.
Denmark, along with over half of the world's nations, has committed itself to the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits their use, manufacture, and stockpiling.
This convention is widely regarded as the international standard that must be applied to effectively rid the world of the horrors of indiscriminate cluster munitions in future. It has already achieved much in restricting, and stigmatising, the use of indiscriminate cluster bombs.
World's biggest users have not signed
But the Convention on Cluster Munitions has not been signed by some of the worlds biggest users: the United States, Russia, China, and India. Instead, work has been carrying on to introduce weaker wording about cluster munitions in a different international convention: the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
Weak because, among other things, the wording would have allowed the use of millions of cluster weapons produced after 1980, and unrestricted use of weapons with a failure rate of less than 1%.
Potential threat to civilians for years
Cluster weapons are bombs, or artillery shells, that open and release up to several hundred small bombs, known as submunitions. These fall to earth and cover a large area. Many of them fail to explode, and pose an indiscriminate danger to civilians for many years. Large areas of Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, for example, are still contaminated with cluster submunitions left over from the Vietnam war over 35 years ago. People continue to be injured and killed by them.
DanChurchAid is actively involved with clearing cluster submunitions in Lebanon, and in Libya.