(United Nations) Russia on Friday prevented the adoption of a joint statement at the end of the four-week UN review conference of the treaty on the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons (NPT), denouncing political terms.
Posted at 9:21 p.m.
The 191 signatories to the NPT, which aims to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons, promote complete disarmament and promote cooperation in the peaceful use of nuclear energy, have met at United Nations headquarters in New York since 1er august.
But despite a month of negotiations and a final session postponed for several hours on Friday, “the conference is not in a position to reach an agreement”, said the president of the conference, the Argentinian Gustavo Zlauvinen, after the intervention of Russia.
While decisions are taken by consensus, the Russian representative, Igor Vishnevetsky, has indeed denounced the lack of “balance” in the draft final text of more than 30 pages.
“Our delegation has a key objection to certain paragraphs which are shamelessly political,” he said, repeating several times that Russia was not the only country to have objections to the text generally.
According to sources close to the negotiations, Russia was particularly opposed to the paragraphs concerning the Ukrainian nuclear power plant in Zaporizhya, occupied by the Russian military.
The latest text on the table, seen by AFP, underlined “great concern” about military activities around Ukrainian power plants, including Zaporizhia, Ukraine’s “loss of control” of these sites and “the significant impact on security”.
Other sensitive elements for certain States were also under discussion during these four weeks, in particular the Iranian nuclear program and the North Korean nuclear tests.
At the last review conference in 2015, the parties were also unable to reach agreement on substantive issues.
In any case, “what is really problematic is that with or without text, it does nothing to reduce the level of nuclear threat at the moment,” Beatrice Fihn, who heads the International Campaign for abolish nuclear weapons (ICAN).
The draft text was “very weak, and detached from reality”, she added, noting the absence of “concrete disarmament commitments”.
At the opening of the conference, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres felt that such a “nuclear danger[avait] not been known since the height of the Cold War”.
“Today, humanity is at a misunderstanding, a miscalculation of nuclear annihilation,” he warned.