Reaching Critical Will

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

Unofficial Transcript
Pakistan
21 June 2006

Thank you very much Madame President. Madame President, a couple of points have been made and I need to clarify these points. Number one: we’ve stated quite clearly in CD, in the informal consultations and in bilateral discussions, our concerns are not only procedural but are of a substantive nature, and these concerns need to be addressed in context of L.1 itself, and therefore to say that we have only procedural concerns is perhaps not a fair comment.

Also, the second comment that has been made here—whether those who have said that they are not in position at this point to agree to the text as it exist right now in the PDD is because we don’t agree with the work to be done in nuclear disarmament, NSA and PAROS is totally misplaced. If you want to look at what we want to present to the Conference as a balanced Program of Work for the Conference, then we would want work to commence simultaneously on all four core areas.

We would want not substantive discussions but negotiations on nuclear disarmament. We would want amendments in the text of L.1 that clearly state that the mandate should be in accordance with the Shannon Mandate and a clear reference made to an international and effectively verifiable treaty and also takes into account stocks. On PAROS, we would also want discussions, and sorry, negotiations to start, and similarly on NSA, we would want negotiations to start, with a view to reaching agreement on a legally binding instrument and effective international arrangement to assure Non-Nuclear Weapon States against the use or threat of use of nuclear weapons.

Hence, this is to clarify the point that we’ve made clearly in the CD and elsewhere that our concerns are not procedural purely but are substantive as well. But we are willing to work with the Conference to find solutions to these problems and to our concerns, and these can be addressed if we can revisit L1.

There was another point in which a reference was made that we should not be looking at narrow national security interests, but global national security. I agree that we should each of us first have to look at national security interest and then place it in the global security interest of everyone. It is difficult to understand that we are talking about focusing just on narrow national security interests of a few countries here while the national security interests of other countries are being well taken care of in security arrangements and nuclear umbrellas that are provided.

Thank you Madame President.