(Dublin: 26 May 08) Two interesting side events took place during the lunchbreak at the Dublin Conference today. The first was a press conference by the Ban Advocates, a team of thirteen cluster munition survivors from Afghanistan, Cambodia, Iraq, Serbia, Tajikistan, and Vietnam. Together the advocates they form a formidable lobby force at this meeting. On Friday, the seventeen year old survivor from Afghanistan Soraj told me that he had met with the British diplomat to this conference, John Duncan, who is fighting hard against several provisions in the draft treaty text particularly “interoperability.”

The other event was a panel on the United States that included mine survivor Ken Rutherford, Nobel laureate Jody Williams, Steve Goose from Human Rights Watch, and Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vt).

The interoperability issue remains one of the more significant items requiring resolution. We have just four days left to fix it…

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