Reaching Critical Will

Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT)

Conference on Disarmament

General Assembly First Committee

UN Disarmament Commission

Special Session on Disarmament

Statement by Ambassador Marius Grinius of Canada to the Conference on Disarmament 17th June 2008

Unofficial Transcript

Thank you Mr. President.

I do congratulate you on your Presidency and on the work that the P6 have been doing to try to break through this impasse. I have listened very closely to our previous speakers today. I don’t have any prepared statement but certainly Canada does join Sweden and Finland in its continued support of CD/1840 as a practical starting point not without a lot of difficulties as pointed out by the Distinguished Ambassador of Pakistan. He did some references to the history of FMCT and what I have been doing over the last week or so has been what I would call an archaeological dig of my files and its always quiet exciting what one can find, including the working files of a number of my predecessors several times removed and I would just like to share a couple of quotations I have come across from my predecessor three times removed, Ambassador Mark Moher, when he was here and discussing the FMCT.

On the 14th of February 1997, he gave a presentation on the issues and prospects of FMCT, and he said “clear thinking on how we begin will be essential. There is no doubt that tough decisions will be necessary during any negotiations and while a decision to begin is necessary, that decision need not prejudge vital issues nor need to possess all the final answers before we even start". That is something well of ten years ago that was said and would suggest that it applies as much today as it did back then in 1997. Ambassador Khan of course referred to the decision back on the 20th of August 1998 where it appointed Ambassador Moher as chairman of the Ad Hoc committee for the current session in the context of starting negotiations on the FMCT but then a few months later in March 1999, he said “we wish to emphasize our regret to address or establish an Ad Hoc committee formally tasked to negotiate, we renew our plea for immediate action” and in that regard we are still pleading for immediate reaction.

In terms of Pakistan’s intervention. I always appreciate our distinguished colleague for being very straight upfront in terms of where his country stands. There is one element that Canada does have difficulty with, one of many, but the issue of negotiations on all 4 core issues – ND, FMCT, PAROS, and NSA, My gut feeling as someone who is relatively new to this august body is that I don’t think that all four core issues are ripe for negotiations. Things like NSA which I thought had been flogged to death 20 years ago, are still no ripe for negotiations and something like that and I think would require having also found mountains of paper on the subject, a necessary perhaps summary of every member of the CD where they stand on something like NSA.

Nuclear Disarmament it seems more like of a wonderful long term objective rather than really a negotiation then is realistic at this point. And Of course our Russian and Chinese friends have put up a treaty on outer space. There is a lot of work as we found out that has to be done on the whole issue of outer space even before any negotiations are contemplated and there seems to be a willingness to discuss this. The bottom line again seems to be that an FMCT can be a much more ripe for serious discussions nuclear disarmament negotiations then any of the other 3 core issues and I certainly would ask members here to be realistic about expectations and not to be rather we must negotiate everything together at once.