John Washburn & Bruce Knotts, April 27, 2020

Resolutions and decisions on disarmament were presented to the seventy-third session of UN General Assembly by its First Committee (FC). Of the 50 total, 19 were adopted in the Committee in 45 recorded votes. The remainder were adopted without votes since they had been carried over from previous years. Although the FC completed its work on time and on budget, its session had often been unusually acrimonious. Both the UN rapporteur who conducted the General Assembly meeting and the representative of Yugoslavia on behalf of the EU and associated states found it necessary to make a special effort to deplore this contentiousness. The latter especially criticized refusals to abide by accepted procedures. The present comment will include a general review of this situation.  A subsequent report in the next issue of Disarmament Times will cover specific instances.

The measures voted on in the FC and then in the General Assembly were all adopted by more than 100 votes. mostly from Third World countries with nations from other areas joining the majority in numbers reflecting the content of particular resolutions. These measures almost entirely expressed the intense desire of non-nuclear states to use the work of the General Assembly under the heading of “general and complete disarmament” to slow down the growth of nuclear weapons and then to eliminate them.* China, Russia, Syria and a few others on one hand and the United States and some supporters on the other hand tried to use resolutions and decisions as well as their general speeches and their interventions in debates to attack each other. Success in this depended on the ability of the respective sponsors to persuade enough countries in the majority to join them. This process and the efforts of the two sides to edit in their favor resolutions proposed by the majority resulted in 45 recorded votes in the Committee. The majority defeated a few resolutions proposed by the minority and in one case forced a withdrawal. All of the resolutions adopted by votes will become standing items on future agendas of the FC.

The Committee’s General debate covered eight days and included presentations by 18 non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Most of these were devoted to specific subjects , such as cluster bombs. outer space and conventional weapons. Many of these presentations were endorsed by considerable numbers of other organizations. Taken together, this event was a sharp reminder of the extraordinarily large numbers of NGOs variously committed to different aspects of disarmament.

These organizations also participated extensively along with governments and UN officials in the General Debate. The General Debate covered nuclear weapons, other weapons of mass destruction, conventional weapons, other disarmament measures, outer space and regional disarmament. It also featured a joint panel of the First and Fourth Committees on space security and sustainability. The panel’s members were representatives of the Office of the UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, United States Office of Space Commerce, UN Office of Space Affairs, Nuclear Space Policy Initiative of the Observer Research Foundation, and the Secure World and Our Secure Future organization. 

The General Debate provided wider perspectives and broader information to the FC’s members and participants beyond the highly politicized and, despite the wide range of its topics, narrowly focused debates in its sessions. Just as those debates reflected the realities of the disarmament goals and aspirations of the great majority of the UN’s members, the General Debate reminded them of what disarmament in its full sense means.

By:  John Washburn