Kazakh efforts lead to a UN Declaration on a Nuke Free World
ASTANA. KAZINFORM The Central Asian Republic of Kazakhstan is widely acknowledged as an unrelenting champion of nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. The country's latest accomplishment is the resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly along with the Universal Declaration on the Achievement of a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World.
President Nursultan Nazarbayev proposed such a Declaration at the first Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in April 2010. The Declaration adopted on December 7, 2015 is based on the draft submitted by Kazakhstan in October 2015. It was co-sponsored by 35 countries, and received support from 133 countries.
However, considering that 23 countries voted against it and 28 abstained, underlines, as Foreign Minister Erlan Idrissov wrote in a recent article, “the campaign must continue”.
The General Assembly Resolution “invites States, agencies and organizations of the United Nations system and intergovernmental and non-governmental organizations to disseminate the Declaration and to promote its implementation”.
The Resolution requests the Secretary-General to submit to the General Assembly at its seventy-third session in 2018 a report on the implementation of the Declaration, and include it in the provisional agenda under the item “General and complete disarmament”, a sub-item entitled “Universal Declaration on the Achievement of a Nuclear-Weapon-Free World”.
According to observers, the Resolution crowns Kazakhstan’s persistent efforts to usher in a nuclear weapons free world, which started with the historic closure of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site in 1991.
As the then Ambassador-at-Large of the Kazakh Ministry of Foreign Affairs Barlybai Sadykov said in an interview with The Astana Times: “It was the first case of closing a nuclear test site in the history of the world at the will of the people. After the closing of the Semipalatinsk test site, other major test sites in Nevada, Novaya Zemlya, Lop Nor and Moruroa fell silent.”
The material was taken from the website of the Kazakhstan Embassy in the U.S. https://www.kazakhembus.com/
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