CCW - Meeting of the Group of Government Experts (GGE)

U.S. closing Statement by Stephen Mathias
Assistant Legal Advisor for Political-Military Affairs
Head of the US Delegation

Geneva, Switzerland   
April 11, 2008

Thank you Mr. Chairman. 

I would like to start by thanking you and your team for the excellent work you have done in planning, preparing for, and running this second round of negotiations on the important issue of cluster munitions.  Your efforts have played a substantial role in helping us to make real progress here this week.  For example, your decision to allow plenty of time for informal consultations, both bilaterally and multilaterally, during the course of the week, led to much of the progress that we have achieved and also laid the groundwork for our future work.

At the beginning of the session, there were two areas in particular where my delegation saw the possibility that we could make substantial progress this week.  The first was on the issue of the application of international humanitarian law in the context of cluster munitions use.  The second was on the issues associated with Protocol V of the CCW.

We believe that progress has, in fact, been made in both areas.  On the topic of international humanitarian law, we believe that the paper produced on this topic has made a substantial contribution by synthesizing the proposals made to date into a single text, but also by generating serious, substantive discussions among delegations on what we are trying to achieve with these provisions.  We believe that the result advances the GGE’s work on what we believe is an important aspect of the new instrument on cluster munitions.

In discussing this work we have done on international humanitarian law, I would be remiss if I did not thank the delegation of Japan for their efforts in chairing the working group that took up the issue and in drafting the documents that we all now have before us.  This was a challenging job, they undertook it extremely well, and we are very grateful to them.

The second area where we have begun to make  progress was made was on cooperation and assistance.  Our good exchanges of views on victims' assistance and international cooperation and the relationship between what we might do in a new instrument with related provisions in Protocol V have shed light on the way forward. We appreciate the work the Friends of the Chair-Austria and Australia-have done to advance our progress.  Austria has provided important focus on victims’ assistance, ensuring this important topic is not an afterthought to our deliberations.  We find the paper produced by Australia to be a solid basis for development of our work on international cooperation. As we stated at the outset of the week, we think any instrument on CM should avoid duplication in these areas, but there may be an opportunity to clarify and strengthen existing provisions and mechanisms as they apply in this context.  . 

While, as I have said, from my delegation’s perspective, we have made good progress in this session, we should also say that we believe that much of the really hard work still lies ahead of us.  As we have indicated a couple of times, we believe that these negotiations will have to address technological improvements in cluster munitions (along with appropriate provisions on use and other issues) which can contribute to mitigating the humanitarian consequences associated with the use of cluster munitions.  We have laid some of the groundwork for this work this week and in January, but we believe that a substantial focus of the negotiations in July should be in this area.

Mr. Chairman, we are all well aware of the differing positions that countries hold on the issues we are addressing in these negotiations and, accordingly, that significant challenges lie ahead as we try to negotiate an instrument on cluster munitions this year.  But we continue to be encouraged by the spirit of engagement and the constructive approach that most delegations have brought to this process, and we believe that under your leadership, if we all focus on finding areas of common ground rather than sticking to preferred national positions, we will be able to succeed in addressing the humanitarian concerns that we all share.

Thank you again Mr. Chairman.