Disarmament Blog: Disarmament In 2019

After a good break over Christmas and the New Year, I’m back in Geneva feeling refreshed for what will be a busy year in disarmament. Here’s a flavour of some the issues that will be on my mind in 2019. (I’ll look at some of them in more detail in future blog posts.)

2019 marks 40 years since the Conference on Disarmament (CD) started, and 100 years since the foundation of the League of Nations, with disarmament at the heart of its mission. It’s a good moment to reflect on where we’ve come from as well as where we go from here. The global security environment is difficult; but it has been before. Prospects for a breakthrough feel remote, but we must keep on laying the groundwork for the next opportunity, and defending and strengthening the existing regimes that have made the world safer.

My immediate priority is the UK’s Presidency of the Conference on Disarmament. We take over from Ukraine on 18 February for four weeks. It will fall to us to manage the annual High Level Segment, when senior figures from around the world come to address the CD.

After that, the next big milestone will be in New York in May: the third and final Preparatory Committee for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2020. That’s the last formal opportunity to put issues on the table and take decisions about how the RevCon will work. As one of the NPT’s depository states, one of the five recognised Nuclear Weapon States, and coordinator of the Western Group of States Parties, we’ll be at the centre of that process and working hard to make it a success.

Having agreed important financial stability measures in 2018, I hope we can use the experts’ meetings of the Biological Weapons Convention this summer to focus on some of the substance once more – in particular, how to respond to biological emergencies.

Highlights on the conventional arms side include the 4th Review Conference of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention in Oslo in November, which will shape the Convention’s direction for the next five years. The UK will serve on the Cooperation and Assistance Committee in 2019-20. We’ll also serve on the Voluntary Trust Fund Selection Committee of the Arms Trade Treaty, assessing bids for projects to support the implementation of the Treaty. Finally, we’ll work hard in the Group of Government Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems to develop the Possible Guiding Principles agreed in 2018, and get deeper into the question of human control over weapon systems.

The rules-based international system is under pressure, and the international security environment getting no easier. I’m convinced that multilateral approaches to disarmament and arms control contribute to international peace and security. The UK will continue to be at the forefront of this important work.