From: iCAN Aotearoa New Zealand

Greetings all,

It’s been an interesting week here, and today we got a clear statement from the Labour and Green Party Disarmament Spokespersons that their parties – the two largest opposition parties here – now support New Zealand talking a leading role in negotiations for a global ban treaty and that such negotiations should begin as soon as possible.

This week began with a forum on Monday ‘Banning nuclear weapons, killer and the use of explosive weapons in populated areas’ with speakers from Article 36 (thank you Thomas), New Zealand Red Cross, Campaign to Stop Killer Robots and iCAN Aotearoa New Zealand; followed today by a forum organised by the Wellington br anch of the United Nations Association, ‘Where to Now After the NPT Review Conference?’ – both forums were  organised by iCAN Aotearoa New Zealand supporting groups and hosted by St Andrew’s in Wellington, the first church (although not the first faith group) to become an iCAN Aotearoa New Zealand supporting group.

Member of Parliament Phil Goff, Labour Party Spokesperson on Disarmament, gave a very clear speech today on the Labour Party’s current position on nuclear weapons (see attached), which concluded: “We should negotiate now, without waiting for the concurrence of the nuclear weapon states, a convention which prohibits nuclear weapons. We should take this step in the expectation that it can generate the same strong practical and normative consequences as the Ottawa and Oslo Conventions did on land mines and cluster munitions. New Zealand has often been at the forefront of initiatives to reduce the risk of nuclear war and to promote disarmament. We ca n and should also be a trail blazer on this issue, rather than waiting for others.”

Phil was the Minister for Disarmament and Arms Control from 2005 to 2008, which included the period when NZ was a member of the Core Group of states that took responsibility for the Oslo Process and the development of the Convention on Cluster Munitions, so he is a very knowledgeable and strong supporter of a similar process to be used to negotiate a global ban on nuclear weapons. In today’s speech, he suggests that a fourth Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons could be the platform to launch the process for a nuclear weapons ban : )

Today’s forum panellists varied between advocating a nuclear weapons convention and a global ban treaty without differentiating between the two approaches, so we asked the Members of Parliament present to clarify their party’s position as follows: does your party support New Zealand talking a leading role in negotiations for a global ban treaty, whether or not nuclear weapons states are involved, and should such negotiations begin as soon as possible? Both the Labour and Green parties now clearly support that position as the immediate goal – with negotiations for a nuclear weapons convention maybe further down the track, but the imperative now is to negotiate a simple global ban treaty.

Finally for now, re the government’s position on the Humanitarian Pledge – the iCAN Aotearoa New Zealand letter to the Minister of Foreign Affairs has resulted in a number of interesting and positive discussions with policy makers and politicians over the past couple of weeks, with more scheduled in the weeks ahead. So perhaps there will also be some good news on that soon (ish) … we’re certainly trying our best on that.

All the best, Edwina Hughes,
Coordinator, iCAN Aotearoa New Zealand