Nobel laureate calls on US to join landmine treaty

SWITZERLAND: Nobel Peace laureate Jody Williams called on the United States on Monday to join the 160 nations that have ratified a global pact banning landmines, leaving other powers such as China and Russia out in the cold.

"We're hoping that the United States will finally put in writing what it has done in fact," said Williams, who shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), which oversees implementation of the Ottawa Convention. "The US has not used their mines since (the 1991 Gulf War), we haven't exported since 1992, we haven't produced since the mid-1990s, and we have destroyed millions in the stockpile," Williams, an American citizen, told reporters in Geneva.

"So the question is, if you're doing it all already, why not sign?" Her comments came as representatives of around 100 governments, including the United States and other countries that have yet to ratify the 1997 treaty, gathered in the Swiss city along with activists and aid workers to evaluate what progress has been made in the past 15 years.

The United States, which is one of only 36 UN countries that have not ratified the 1997 Ottawa Convention, has voiced fears in the past its national defence and other security commitments could suffer if it joined.

Others who have not signed up to the treaty include fellow permanent UN Security Council members China and Russia, as well as Cuba, Iran, Israel, North and South Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan and Syria.

But she acknowledged: "I'm always less than totally optimistic, just because of the history of the US and international treaties." Having the United States officially lend its support to the treaty would carry great symbolic value, ICBL chair Steve Goose told AFP.

A US ratification "would be a really good push for the 30-some states that are still outside.

It will increase the likelihood of those hold-out states coming onboard," he said.

AFP