Aidan Liddle
UK Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament
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4th December 2020
Geneva, Switzerland
I’ve spent much of the last two weeks in virtual meetings of the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (APMBC) and the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). Land mines and cluster munitions are especially pernicious weapons. They claim lives and limbs, and prevent civilians from returning to their land, for sometimes decades after conflict is over. One […]
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27th August 2020
Geneva, Switzerland
When we think about security in outer space, it’s tempting to fall back on tropes from science fiction or the movies – dramatic battles between space-suited soldiers in Moonraker, or powerful weapons threatening planets in Star Wars. In reality, there are threats to security and stability on Earth involving outer space, but they don’t include […]
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7th July 2020
Geneva, Switzerland
The Conference on Disarmament resumed its 2020 session on Tuesday, after a break of 122 days. (We had been supposed to meet a week earlier, but technical problems with the new remote participation platform meant the meeting was cancelled at the eleventh hour.) But did anyone miss the CD while it was silent? Should it […]
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11th June 2020
Geneva, Switzerland
I last blogged in late February on the P5 Conference in London, looking ahead to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in April. The coronavirus outbreak in China was on our minds, of course, but none of us knew then how it would affect the rest of the world. Switzerland reported its first death from […]
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21st February 2020
Geneva, Switzerland
Last week saw a major milestone in preparations for the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference in April, when the five NPT Nuclear Weapon States met at Lancaster House in London for their ninth annual ‘P5’ conference. We began the Conference by welcoming the new RevCon President-designate, Gustavo Zlauvinen of Argentina, and the chairs of […]
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10th January 2020
Geneva, Switzerland
2020 is going to be a hugely important year for multilateral disarmament in Geneva. The biggest event of the year, of course, is the Review Conference of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which takes place in New York over April and May. The RevCon’s job is to look back over the last five years and “identify […]
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4th December 2019
Geneva, Switzerland
The Norwegian capital Oslo is where, in September 1997, the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention (APMBC) was concluded, and also where the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, and its founder Jody Williams, were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize the following year. So although the Convention is often known as the Ottawa Convention, after the city where […]
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4th October 2019
Geneva, Switzerland
The three principles of disarmament are usually held to be verifiability, irreversibility and transparency. Transparency underpins the other two principles. You can’t tell whether what’s been done is irreversible unless you can verify it; you can’t verify it unless it’s transparent. As such, transparency, often in the shape of reporting by States Parties, is a […]
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16th September 2019
Geneva, Switzerland
The Conference on Disarmament (CD) adopted its Annual Report to the UN General Assembly last week. Thanks to the skilful work of the sixth and final President for the year, Zimbabwean Ambassador Taonga Mushayavanhu, this was a quicker and much less fractious process than many of us were expecting. With that, a week ahead of […]
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2nd September 2019
Geneva, Switzerland
As August turns to September, the traffic jams return to Geneva and the evenings start drawing in. People start returning from the beaches or mountains. It’s ‘back to school’ time. In fact, the disarmament community has been back at work since 29 July, when the CD resumed its 2019 session. So I feel like I’ve […]
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