David Miliband

Foreign Secretary

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Monday 02 June, 2008

Cluster munitions

It was nice to be able to join Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Store in person in Oslo on 29 May to congratulate him on his initiative that eventually brought together 109 countries in Dublin to agree a treaty banning cluster munitions. As he said at our press conference on 30 May it sets a new "norm" for the world - and should do so. The United Kingdom has always argued it would sign a good treaty and the detailed work on definitions and interoperability issues made the difference over the last week. Like the anti-personnel mine ban convention of 1997 this treaty should set a new global standard.

Posted at 10:38 02 June 2008 by David Miliband  |  Comments[7]

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David, I think to use the word 'nice' to describe a step on the road to banning these obscene weapons is a somewhat inadequate word. What we need to see now is pressure on our 'allies' America and Israel to follow the lead.

Posted by Robert on June 02, 2008 at 09:12 PM BST #

Ethical foreign policy in action. Keep up the good work!

Posted by Mark Downing on June 02, 2008 at 11:18 PM BST #

This treaty is nonsense. They were having similar conferences in the 1900s. If we ever find ourselves in a serious war again, we all know that treaties will be ignored if it suits our purpose and rightly so. It's just a piece of window dressing to make ourselves look good.

Posted by Alexander King on June 04, 2008 at 05:37 AM BST #

So what? We have lots of other nasty ways to kill and maim people in our armoury so what's a few cluster bombs more or less? Here's a better idea! How about if we stopped selling weapons of any sort to unstable, irresponsible governments such as that in Burma sorry - Myanmar - my mistake for being too Imperial? That too would save a lot of innocent lives.

Posted by Paul Everest on June 04, 2008 at 09:49 PM BST #

Paul, if we stopped selling weapons to every bad government, there British arms industry would die. We would then be forced to rely on other states to sell us arms. In effect, we would no longer have the ability to defend ourselves - the first duty of every government.

Posted by Alexander King on June 06, 2008 at 12:01 AM BST #

Credit for doing the right thing, I won't take that away from you. But why did you waste so much of the time and effort people have put into campaigning by trying to retains stocks of "smart" cluster bombs? When you do the right thing in the end you should acknowledge the cost all round of not having done it earlier.

Posted by Owen on June 07, 2008 at 02:17 PM BST #

I am with Robert... "nice"? It's almost like saying "wasn't it nice that fascism didn't consume Europe", or "wasn't it nice of the South African government to let Mandela out of jail", or "wasn't it nice that the Canadians finally apologised for the terrible treatment of native peoples" PS. has Britain ever apologised for the empire?, or "wasn't it nice that slavery was abolished?", or "isn't it nice that after the invention of the nuclear bomb we are all still here!"... Well I'm glad it was "nice".

Posted by Jana Mills on June 13, 2008 at 03:30 AM BST #

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