Mr. President, on behalf of like-minded Observer States, both candidates for Membership and those who have requested in participation only to the Conference on Disarmament, my Delegation would like to express its gratitude to your Excellency and to your fellow Presidents of the P6 for a job well-done for stirring us to the passage of a historic Work Programme and the annual report and – to cite a Distinguished Delegate – “for laying the foundation for the magnificent tall sky scraper which will constitute the actual work of the Conference in its coming sessions”. I also wish to convey our condolences to Ambassador Akram for the passage of his mother, and I also wish to recognize those Colleagues who will be leaving us, Camilo of Chile, Diego of Venezuela and Tofigh of Iran and their meaningful contributions to the work of the CD and for their friendship - God’s speed to you and au revoir but not adieu. We expect you to continue to champion our cause in your respective capitals.

Mr. President,
we, too, are eager to sustain the momentum that has been achieved in this august chamber with the adoption of Decision 1864 and look forward to the resolutions of the issues raised in the past weeks, so that we may all begin in our work in earnest next year. As we felt obviously, the priority of the CD after May of this year was and is to provide for a framework of implementation for the Work Programme. We decided until this moment, the conclusion of our 2009 session, to raise once again an issue of utmost importance to us – the expansion of the membership of the CD. As the annual report of the CD has noted; there are 25 states that have formally petitioned for full membership since 1982, and there are more states which have requested the status of Observer in this and in previous sessions.

Mr. President,
may I also take this opportunity to reiterate a proposal which our Delegation and a number of other states had made last week; in that we should take advantage of the next few months and educate ourselves more thoroughly in the issues, substance and procedures of the CD.

We would like to call again on the Secretariat, UNIDIR and the NGO disarmament community, as well as the experts among the membership of the CD, to organize a series of orientation and training sessions and seminars to this end in the coming weeks before the start of the 2010 CD sessions.

Mr. President,
We thank the delegations which supported our cause and we appeal to the membership as a whole to include the matter of CD expansion in its work next year. Will it not only enrich the CD and make it a truly universal body, if we were to favourably consider our petitions for membership? If we are indeed laying the foundation for the building for the future work of the CD, would it not only further strengthen the building if more bricks and pillars were to be added to reinforce our structure?

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