Immediately after the opening plenary concluded yesterday, the President of the Conference, Irish Ambassador Daithi O’Ceallaigh, got down to business. The Rules of Procedure were adopted with no objections (very good news). Then the diplomats remained in the plenary hall for the “Committee of the Whole” in which the draft treaty text was read article by article. Any government could intervene during this reading and, if the President felt there was no consensus on a particular issue, he appointed a Friend of the Chair to search for agreement by convening informal consultations or bilateral meetings on the subject. Sometimes a member of Ireland’s conference team was delegated to discuss the issue concerned with the state that made the intervention.

By the time the Committee of the Whole completed the reading of the text at 4.00pm on the second day, a series of informal consultations had been convened by diplomats (typically ambassadors) on: definitions (convened by New Zealand Ambassador Don MacKay), interoperability (Switzerland), storage and stockpile destruction (Norway), victim assistance (Austria), and compliance (South Africa). Additional discussions are being held on clearance and destruction of cluster bomb remnants, while the Irish team is talking to delegates on transparency measures, national implementation measures, settlement of disputes, and meetings of states parties.

Outside the formal meetings, the second day of the treaty negotiations was marked by a continuation of the strong emphasis on assistance to survivors of cluster munitions. I attended a lunchtime side event on the treaty’s victim assistance provisions, which, if adopted, will constitute a very strong legal obligation for states to assist cluster munition victims. Raed El Rahhmann Mokaled gave an emotional testimony about his five-year-old son Ahmad, who was killed by a cluster bomblet at a park near his home in Nabatieh, Lebanon in 1991. I took more photos including of Cambodian survivor Youen Sam En who lost both hands and his eyesight in 2004 to a cluster bomb that the United States dropped in the 1970s.

As Friend of the Chair on definitions, New Zealand’s Ambassador Don MacKay is responsible for securing agreement on one of the most contentious issues in these talks: what constitutes a cluster munition. As was the case at the Wellington Conference, several states are expected to make proposals that would exempt their cluster munitions. There appears to be dwindling support for broad exceptions for cluster munitions with self-destruct mechanisms or with a limited number of submunitions and a broad geographic representation of states opposed such exceptions. MacKay has scheduled a continuation of his informal consultations at 6.30pm tonight, which means we might miss out on opportunities to lobby some of the most powerful diplomats at the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund reception tonight.

Check out this YouTube video by the Cluster Munition Coalition on the opening day of the conference. It features footage shot by Chris Anderson and New Zealander Raechel Rees and was edited by New Zealander James Miekle. - Mary Wareham, Oxfam NZ/ANZCMC Coordinator

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