CCW Report, Vol. 10, No. 11
Editorial: Procedural tyranny continues at the CCW
22 November 2022
Ray Acheson | Reaching Critical Will
Above all else, last week’s Meeting of High Contracting Parties (HCPs) to the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) demonstrated the inevitable outcome of the normalisation of procedural nonsense. While the Meeting was able to agree to dates for next year’s work on various issues, it failed to meet the urgency around many issues on its agenda, including autonomous weapons, incendiary weapons, and mines other than anti-personnel mines. Once again, a single delegation—Russia—was able to override the interests and priorities of the vast majority of HCPs. The CCW is turning into a one-state forum, where consensus is wielded as veto and horrific weapons are being used and developed in its wake.
Constraining consensus
For years, the CCW has been languishing. HCPs have gone from negotiating protocols to debating for hours over whether to include a document number reflecting past reports. That HCPs engage in this as if it is serious work normalises this behaviour, turning the CCW from a promising place to prohibit weapons of concern into a problematic venue where progress has become less and less possible, into what is now a farcical forum in which one single delegation blocks everything it doesn’t like—and even objects to other HCPs describing it as “blocking” things, because that word doesn’t appear in the rules of procedure.
On top of this, civil society has been increasingly squeezed out of deliberations. Once a good model for civil society participation in UN disarmament forums, the CCW is becoming a more hostile environment—again because of one delegation. While many HCPs have defended the engagement of non-governmental organisations and activists within the work for the Convention, pointing out the many contributions such groups have made to the development of the protocols and providing information about the impacts of weapons, Russia has in recent years repeatedly blocked civil society from participating in “informal” meetings that used to be open.
Rather than a tool for listening and learning from everyone’s positions and interests in order to reach agreement, consensus is at this point a definitive constraint on reaching agreement. It is instead a tool for domination. This is not just Russia’s approach—other delegations abuse consensus in this way in other forums, including the United States and Pakistan on various issues in the Conference on Disarmament, which has not been able to adopt a programme of work since 1996. The abuse of consensus has now also reached toxic levels in the CCW, where the majority opinion is consistently overruled, leaving the CCW to plod along in is established tracks, accomplishing nothing of relevance to confront the very real death and destruction happening outside the halls of the United Nations.
Automating violence while the CCW looks on
A key example of this is the failure of the CCW to move forward on preventing the use of incendiary weapons. For years, civil society groups and many HCPs have been calling for strengthening the CCW’s Protocol III, which has proven insufficient to prevent catastrophic human suffering from the use of these horrific weapons. But even very minimalist proposals for focused discussions on the implementation and universalisation of Protocol III have been repeatedly rejected by Russia and Israel. There were some intense periods of déjà vu at this Meeting of HCPs from the Sixth CCW Review Conference at the end of last year, where Russia refused to allow even one day of meetings to be set aside for this purpose. It objected again this year to any discussions of incendiary weapons, even though they have been used in recent years in Afghanistan, Gaza, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen, causing grave harm.
Another example lies within the Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) on autonomous weapons, which earlier this year was unable to agree to a report that reflected the work and preferences of the vast majority of participants. The final draft report was stripped of its substantive content and simply rolled over the mandate for the next round of meetings, despite the demand from most delegations for a concrete commitment to elaborate proposals or negotiate a new protocol. At last week’s Meeting of HCPs, Russia also got its way on the number of days of work for the GGE next year, meaning that the Group will convene for only 10 days in 2023 instead of 20 as preferred by the majority. In the meantime, states and tech companies and weapon manufacturers are proceeding rapidly with the development and deployment of increasing autonomous weapon systems, without addressing any of the ethical, moral, legal, political, or technical disasters they will inevitably entail.
Breaking out of the deadlock
Many HCPs are trying to think of ways around the blockage. There is a joint proposal, for example, for the incoming CCW chair to hold consultations on Protocol III in order to make some progress. But unfortunately, such efforts do not address the core problem of the CCW and other consensus-based forums.
Rather than protecting the interests of the minority, consensus protects the interests of those who wish to dominate and control the international agenda. Either these forums need to figure out a way to abolish the de facto veto, or we need new processes and initiatives to make sure that work can be accomplished. The bans on antipersonnel landmines and cluster munitions, as well as the new political declaration on the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, were achieved in independent, inclusive processes; the ban on nuclear weapons and controls on the international arms trade were achieved through the democratic UN General Assembly. The work on autonomous weapons and incendiary weapons, among others, must be taken up in spaces where the lives of human beings are prioritised above a state’s ability to inflict harm and violence.
[PDF] ()