2000
REVIEW CONFERENCE OF THE TREATY ON THE
NON-PROLIFERATION OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS
STATEMENT
BY
LUIS RAUL ESTEVEZ LOPEZ
MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY
DEPUTY PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE
NEW
YORK, 1 MAY 2000
Mr.
President,
Allow
me to begin, like the other delegations that have participated in
this General Debate, by congratulating you on your election as
President of the 2000 Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation
of Nuclear Weapons, congratulation I wish to extend to the other
members of the General Committee. We are certain that thanks to your
experience and your devotion to this theme, we shall reach progress
in our efforts toward nuclear disarmament.
Among
the ideal legal norms formulated and commented on by Cicero in his
Treatise on the Laws a fundamental principle stands out. This
principle, having attained the status of a proverb, is known to all
of us. It holds that the safety of the people should be the supreme
law. "Ollis salus populi supreme lex esto." It was
necessary to avoid, at all costs and above all, that in wars with
other nations the Roman people should undergo tremendous massacres,
subjugation or, worst of all, total extermination.
But
neither in the days of the illustrious orator nor at any time during
the roughly twenty centuries that followed did it occur to anyone
that the principle in question was susceptible of universal
or global application. For, despite the dreadful catastrophe
that the First World War inflicted on humanity, it was unthinkable
that the action of the human being could endanger the safety of the
human species in its absolute totality.
This
situation changed radically with the advent of the possibility, so
horrendously and convincingly demonstrated in August 1945, that the
application of nuclear science to warfare could result in holocausts
that were theretofore unimaginable, by reason of their nature and
effects as well as of their tremendous proportions. For, with the
first use of the nuclear weapon humanity began to be haunted by the
specter of the possibility of its complete or nearly complete
annihilation as a result of an armed conflict.
For
this reason it became, unfortunately, necessary to transpose the
Ciceronian principle to the global area. Thus, some two thousand
years following its enunciation by Cicero, the authors of the Treaty
on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons proclaimed, in the first
paragraph of its preamble, the need to "take measures to
safeguard the security of peoples."
Guatemala,
which is a party to that treaty since its entry into force, that is,
since 1970, is not unaware that, as is the case with all human
works, the instrument is not perfect. And, what is more, the non-proliferation
treaty is characterized by a fundamental anomaly that was
deliberately provided for by its authors, namely, the inequality
that existed between the five States that possessed nuclear weapons
prior to 1967, that is to say the five permanent members of the
Security Council, and the other States parties, which were obligated
under the treaty never to possess them.
This
defect does not, however, provide a fully valid ground for
criticizing the treaty. For realism
compels us to recognize that the inequality I have mentioned cannot be
eliminated by a stroke of the pen. This the present-day reality
and the one that, to a far larger extent, existed when the
non-proliferation treaty was adopted, i.e. a time during which
the cold war was going through one of its most acute periods.
Moreover, and above all, the authors of the treaty realized that it
constituted no more than an intermediate step towards a more
satisfactory state of affairs, namely complete nuclear disarmament, which was foreseen in Article VI of the treaty. They
also realized that, desirable as it was, that objective could be
transcended, since in that article they referred to the need for
negotiations aiming not only at nuclear disarmament but also at the
adoption of "a treaty on general and complete disarmament under
strict and effective international control," which would bring
humanity, with respect to security, to a relatively golden age when
the application of the Ciceronian maxim would be relegated to the
environmental sphere.
When
welcoming, five years ago, the results of the last review conference,
Guatemala hailed the accomplishment that was attained by overcoming
the serious obstacles that stood in the way of an indefinite extension
of the treaty. Thus, at this sixth Conference, which differs from all
the others in being the first to be held in the second millennium, we
can finally meet without harboring the least doubt as to the future
existence of the treaty.
We
also welcome the consolidation and perfecting of the review
conferences effected at the historic 1995 review conference.
Although
the road ahead is still a long one, we are also satisfied by the
strides made since that conference, among which we have the following:
The
conclusions reached by the International Court of Justice in its 1996
advisory opinion on the legality of the threat of use or the use of
nuclear weapons.
The
statements by the five nuclear powers contained in document NPT/C0NF.2000/PC.I/2,
of 8 April 1997, as well as the intentions subsequently expressed by
those States with respect to Article VI of the non‑proliferation
treaty and reproduced in paragraph 28 of background document NPT/CONF.2000/3.
We
are also pleased that nine States have become parties to the Treaty
during the last five years, as well as the action by the Russian Duma
on the START II Treaty and the CTBT, which constitutes a significant
progress toward nuclear disarmament.
The
progress made on the issue of nuclear weapon free zones, especially in
Central Asia and Mongolia, and express, once more, our complete
support to the strengthening of the already existing free zones,
noticing with satisfaction that them now cover the whole of the
southern hemisphere. In this regard, we have examined with the
greatest interest the information contained in background document NPT/CONF.2000/5.
Mr.
President,
As
subscriber Guatemala is concerned, however, over the negative attitude
towards the Complete Test Ban Treaty maintained by a few States that
also do not participate in the Non-Proliferation Treaty and whose
participation in the CTBT is necessary for its entry into force. We
urge those States to examine in depth, objectively and with an eye to
the future, the advisability of becoming parties to both treaties. We
also exhort any other State that has not yet carried out the
formalities necessary for participating in the complete test ban
treaty to consider the convenience of taking this action shortly.
We
are equally concerned that there are still some States that do not
participate in the non-proliferation treaty and have destructive
nuclear capability. To them and to all those that still remain outside
the NPT, we would like to extend an invitation to join us in the fight
toward nuclear disarmament.
Finally,
we call upon the States of South Asia and the Middle East to continue
their efforts in order to offer their peoples, in the near future, the
benefits of living in nuclear weapon free zones.
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