Reaching Critical Will

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

Statement by Mr Victor Vasiliev of Russia
to the Conference on Disarmament 27th March 2008

Unofficial Transcript

Thank you very much Sir.

We would like to welcome you here in your lofty post, speaking in an official meeting under your presidency and would like to assure you of our cooperation in this very important area of activity in the conference. We wish you every success. We also listen with great interest to the statement made by the Permanent Representative of France to the CD and your statement to the problem on nuclear disarmament as well as other question on the agenda of the conference which we will certainly study closely.

Mr. President, Distinguished Colleagues

The Russian delegate believes that at the first stage of the conference this year we have done a lot of useful work. During Tunisian’s Presidency, the agenda was adopted; we started informal consultations on all agenda items before the CD. These debates were continued under the Presidency of Turkey and there was professional work done by the coordinators who conducted informal discussions as appointed by the Presidents. Within the high level segments we heard the Secretary General of the United Nations address the Conference and a large group of Ministers and Deputy Ministers, Foreign Ministers attended from a number of countries. On the 12th of February, Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation made an official proposal to our forum on a Prevention of the Placement of Weapons in nuclear spaces put forward by China and Russia and also proposed to our Body, possible elements for an eventual agreement on giving global status to the obligation under the treaty of medium and short range missile.

Mr. president
We would like to thank all the Presidents for their active work at this first stage and for the draft resolution they have prepared. Here I am talking about CD/1840. These are the results of a considerable amount of work and numerous consultations with all delegations and the logical outcome of our efforts undertaken in recent years in order to normalize the situation in the CD. Of course not everything in this proposal is fully satisfactory to us and to other delegations. We would be more interested in a more active mandate in particular to the area of prior concern to us. Nonetheless, we see this document CD/1840 as an area we come together in the interests of all states which is something we can consider as compromise and we are ready to refrain from objecting to this proposal. The main thrift of document CD1840 after a ten year hiatus the CD should be able to return to normal work.

We also want to voice one consideration in connection with the President’s proposal on the organization on the work of the onference before the end of the summer session and as we know that as a result of two rounds of discussions. The coordinators prepared a Presidents report which the state parties looked at. Unfortunately the delegations were not given the opportunity to speak to coordinators to give their proposals and comments on this report. And we feel that we could revert to this during the course of the second session of the CD. And we are convinced that a discussion of this kind will be useful first and foremost for the coordinators themselves and of course for the work of the onference.

Mr. President and distinguished colleague, today is the last plenary session of the winter session of the CD and we are aware that the upcoming break in the work of the conference will involved a number of important disarmament measures and in particular we are interested in consultations of the Presidents with members states and regional groups should continue in this intercessional period and we should that they will bring us to a consensus on the draft work program of the conference.

And we would also like to inform the distinguished colleagues and the representatives of NGOS that in the intercessional period, there will be two important conferences organized by UNIDIR on problems relating directly to the work of the CD. On the 31st of March and 1st of April there will be the traditional conference on security in space and this is something we consider to be the logical continuation of our discussion on this topic during the CD. And at the end of April on the 24th and 25th, there will be a conference eon international information security – threats to cyber space and how to combat these. Both of these events will be held here in this room and we consider them to be highly significant.