International Seminar on Disarmament

Lima, Perú
Dec-1999

The 2000 Review Conference of the NPT:
What do we expect? A NGO Proposal

Mr. Ben Sanders

There are two obvious ways to make a presentation on the 2000 Review Conference of the NPT: by discussing the operating mode of the event, and by giving a projection of the issues that are likely to become major subjects of discussion, and how they will shape the outcome of the Conference. The former approach is procedural, and as such it is a safe way of dealing with the subject: one describes the rules that have been adopted and the ones that still need to be settled, and because the options are limited, the prediction has to remain within clear boundaries. Speculating on the substantive course of events is much riskier: the outcome will be - as they say - "anybody's guess", and the prediction is not very productive.

Perhaps the best way is to try and combine the two approaches: define the procedural issues that still need to be settled, and see how they might help shape the outcome of the Conference. The Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) for the 2000 NPT Review Conference has adopted recommendations on most of the procedural questions on which the Review Conference has to decide at the start of its proceedings. It has also dealt with the question of the `products' of the 2000 Conference: it has recommended that these should include a forward-looking document specifying objectives and a backward-looking review assessing past performance.

However, the PrepCom has not been able to agree on a recommendation as to how the Conference should adopt this `product'. I believe that this will be the principal procedural question the Conference will have to deal with, as soon as substantive differences of view prevent agreement on the text to be adopted, and it may well prove to be an extremely difficult question. The draft Rules of Procedure contain the formulation that "...every effort should be made to reach agreement on substantive matters by means of consensus. There should be no voting on such matters until all efforts to achieve consensus have been exhausted". This is very general language which may have to be further refined, given the understanding that there will in fact be two `products'. The question is far from a theoretical one. If, as one may assume, there will be profound differences of view on important substantive issues, the question how the Conference would nevertheless try to arrive at an agreed product is obviously of great importance. Past Review Conferences have always tried to adopt by consensus a Final Declaration. Where this was achieved, it was the product of intensive give and take, and of profound compromise; it was achieved only twice out of the total of five Review Conferences that have been held in the 30 years since the entry into force of the Treaty.

This makes it high time, to my mind, to ask oneself whether it is absolutely indispensable for the entire final product - both the forward-looking document and the backward-looking review - to be adopted by consensus. To my knowledge, the question whether it is crucial for both `products' to be adopted by consensus has never been thoroughly discussed. It should be. And a second question to be raised is if, should a consensus be impossible to reach, there is any alternative to a straight "for or against" vote.

There is also the question what "consensus" really means. The Final Declaration of the Review Conference of 1985 contains a passage that makes clear that there was no agreement on one specific issue, the question of the priority to be given to a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty:

"[the] Conference except for certain States whose views are reflected in the following subparagraph, deeply regretted that the comprehensive multilateral Nuclear Test Ban Treaty banning all nuclear tests by all States... had not been concluded so far..."

The views of the UK and the US, which were the "certain States" referred to, were reflected as "...certain States Party to the Treaty, while committed to the goal of an effectively verifiable comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, considered deep and verifiable reductions in existing arsenals of nuclear weapons as the highest priority...".

In this way, a matter of disagreement on an important element in the text of the Final Declaration was resolved without the adoption of a compromise that would have bridged the gap between the various views, and it was nevertheless possible to claim that there was "consensus" on the Final Declaration.

But if there is no way to obtain consensus on a text, even through devices such as these, it may be useful to consider which part of the `product' must definitely be adopted by consensus and which might be the subject of another procedure. If such a distinction can be made, it should be possible for the part of the Conference's `product' that comprises an evaluation of past events, and which is therefore most likely to reflect widely different assessments, to be contained in a report that summarizes the various positions, and which is then agreed to as such a summary. In preparing this document, the Secretariat, the Drafting Committee, or perhaps a small group formed from both, would have to try to produce a text that is readily adoptable, but that should not be conceived as the lowest common denominator of the various views, for it is not a document that needs to receive, or is indeed susceptible to receiving, agreement on substance.

The part of the `product' that consists of recommendations for the future will most probably have to be adopted by consensus, however. Achieving that will be a matter of hard negotiating; that is probably unavoidable, but it need not be impossible.

Another procedural issue that will have to be settled is that of the creation of subsidiary bodies to the Main Committees. This issue caused problems at the second session of the PrepCom, but in the end it was agreed to include in the draft Rules of Procedure a provision that permits the establishment of "subsidiary bodies so as to provide for a focused consideration of specific issues relevant to the Treaty". While this reflects the decision adopted at the 1995 Conference on Strengthening the Review Process for the Treaty, paragraph 6, there are delegations that are strongly opposed to the idea of having subsidiary bodies for certain subjects, such as nuclear disarmament. This is as much a substantive as a procedural issue, and there would seem to be little room for compromise: it is a "go/no go" proposition. There probably is no point in even voting on this matter; unless consensus can be reached on the establishment of any given subsidiary body it may be difficult to have such a body at all.

Yet another procedural issue is that of the informal group that might assist the President in his/her work. This is not something on which the Conference will be asked to pronounce itself, but it is nonetheless of great importance. At the 1985 Review Conference, the institution of the "Friends of the President" turned out to be very useful. That was a group of never more than 20 delegates, composed of representatives of the three depositaries (Russia, the United Kingdom and the USA - three nuclear-weapon states; China and France were not yet NPT parties); the coordinators of the various regional groups; the chairs of the Main Committees and of the Drafting Committee; and a handful of delegates from some particularly active states, as well as the Secretary-General; who was closely involved in drafting. The President used the members of this group to feed his views and the results of the group's discussions into the various regional gatherings, and he made sure that, through the coordinators, he remained informed of the views of their regions. In this composition, the Friends of the President were able to do important work on drafting solutions or suggesting approaches for particular sticking points.

At the Review and Extension Conference of 1995 a somewhat different approach was followed, which recognized the conditions that prevailed at that time. Given the fact that the cohesion within the various regional groups was less than it had been ten years earlier, it was no longer possible to use the co-ordinators as conduits to the extent it had been done before. This meant that what was now called the "President's Consultations" was a more loosely structured group of initially fewer than 25 members, but which eventually included many more, since it was found practically impossible to exclude delegates who insisted on being involved, or who simply `gate-crashed', while the criteria for membership had to be continually adjusted. I believe it is also fair to say that in the end, there were participants among the latter category who seemed less representative and spoke with less authority than had been the case during the initial stages of the Conference.

I do not believe that the inability of the Conference to agree on the text of a Final Declaration was entirely due to problems such as these, but I do think that, had it been possible to keep the group smaller and more cohesive, it might have had a somewhat greater chance of agreeing on a text. But what is more important, in my view, than size, is that a body of this kind should be able to provide a forum for consultations on major problems as well as on distinctive disagreements - such as specific formulations in a draft text - and that it should be capable of serving as an effective conduit between the President, the Bureau and the other leading members of the Conference, on the one hand, and all other delegates on the other hand, so that the Conference as a whole feels fully in the picture, even though the group remains limited in size.

The 2000 Review Conference will meet under difficult conditions. It is neither necessary nor indeed possible to recite the many factors that may have a negative influence on the proceedings. States' perceptions of the nature and of the potential impact of recent events are sure to diverge greatly. It is safe to assume, however, that among considerations that will influence events, the following will be recognized:

· the rejection by the US Senate of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) has raised doubts about the viability of that instrument and the likelihood that the current testing moratorium will last forever. It may also raise doubts among non-nuclear-weapon states about the commitment of the US to non-proliferation;
· American plans for a National Missile Defense System (NMD) run counter to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty. Attempts to change that treaty have raised suspicion among other nuclear-weapon states that the US seeks to upset the present strategic balance and is seen by them as threatening the entire fabric of international nuclear disarmament;
· the air campaign in Iraq, and the NATO action in Yugoslavia may be seen by some non-nuclear-weapon states as grounds to seek a nuclear-weapon capability, in self-defence, or in any case as an excuse to keep the option open;
· the new NATO doctrine has raised suspicions of the intentions of Western nations with regard to nuclear "sharing" and to compliance of those states with Articles I and II of the Non-Proliferation Treaty; and,
· the lack of willingness of the nuclear-weapon states to discuss in the Conference on Disarmament (CD) any multilateral approach to nuclear disarmament, is seen by many non-nuclear-weapon states as a form of non-compliance with Article VI of the NPT.

These are only some among a wide variety of potentially negative factors, but even this limited list should suffice to justify the assumption that the Conference will see some very difficult debates. Factors such as these will constitute the background against which the Conference will have to discuss perpetual issues like nuclear disarmament; the situation in the Middle East, the problems of states, both among the Parties to the NPT and among the hold-outs, that have broken the non-proliferation norm; states' quests for security assurances and aspects of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, including safeguards and the issue of nuclear export conditions. In this situation it is nothing less than imperative that the Conference should seek an operating mode that facilitates to the extent possible the adoption of a meaningful `product': an honest assessment of the achievements so far - even if this reflects great differences of view - and an agreed listing of actions needed to help the Treaty meet its purposes.