New Zealand, Statement to the Conference on Disarmament, September 4th, 2007
Unofficial Transcription

Thank you very much indeed, Mr. President. Could I at the outset echo the comments that have been made by other colleagues with regard to the importance of the role that you have as President and complete confidence in the way that you will handle that role and I think too, that our confidence is reflected very well on the content of the draft report that you have presented to us. I have just a couple of comments to make in the light of the statements we have heard from distinguished colleges this mourning.

The first is to welcome the statement from distinguished colleague from China, the issue of transparency was something to which a great deal of attention was paid in the informal consultations that were held under the various coordinators, and I think that it was clear from the quite extensive discussion about the need for transparency, greater transparency on all our parts, and greater confidence building, that all colleagues in the conference attached to a huge amount of importance to that. Indeed, I think that the discussions that we had about transparency and confidence building was one bit of the discussion that we had in the course of those informal discussions here, and we very much welcome further moves by colleagues in the area of transparency, and wish to express our appreciation to the distinguished Ambassador of China, for the statement that he has given this morning, and we look forward to receiving further information on the follow up of the Chinese decision.

Could I then turn to the matter of the report, and as I said, I think the draft that you have presented us with is a draft on which we can have a great deal of confidence, clearly from the comments that have been made, several colleagues will have proposals to amend it, and I imagine that other colleagues who have not spoken will also have proposals to amend it.

It’s very important that the report maintain the flavor of the discussion that we have had this year. Certainly as the distinguished colleague from Pakistan pointed out for example there are precedents in relation of other years.

As the nature of precedents; there are of course good precedents and there are bad precedents and I think that it would be extremely unfortunate if the draft report on this year’s work was gutted to the point that a lot the flavor and the very useful progress that was made during the course of the year, and also the proposals of the P6—it would be a pity if that would be gutted from the report, because we all know, that the work that was done and the proposal and work that was done by the P6 has advanced our situation a great deal, and I think that if not all of us, but certainly the majority hope that the work that was done will enable us to begin our substantive work in the Conference very soon, after such long periods of negotiations.

Obviously, we haven’t seen all of the proposals for amendments that have been made and we just received the proposal from our distinguished colleague from Pakistan. I thank him for providing his proposal amendments in writing, which is most helpful. I haven’t had the time to go trough them in detail, having just received them, but I do note that for example there is a proposal to delete Paragraph 56 of the draft report.

Paragraph 56 is one of the few, if not the only, but certainly one of the few, forward looking paragraphs in the report., and it talks about the Conference’s belief that it should make further intense efforts to build upon the achievements of 2007, for full harmonization of views on the main priorities, and to keep the momentum created to move the Conference of Disarmament out of it’s long standing stalemate. That is clearly the sense of the room from the discussion and comments that I heard from colleagues, and I think it would be extremely unfortunate if that particularly sentiment for example was to be removed from the document.

So my fundamental point is that although precedents are important we should not allow ourselves to be strangled by precedent. We have had I think a particularly good year in the Conference. Unfortunately it has not been a good year since we have not able to commence negotiations, but otherwise it has been a good year, and I think that the report needs to reflect that and to retain the flavor of that year.