Representatives from 67 states participated in the Lima Conference on Cluster Munitions (LCCM) from 23-25 May 2007. Information on the states attending and the states engaged in the process is available at the end of this report.
The CMC held a Regional Civil Society Forum the day before on 22 May, attended by around 100 participants, including NGOs and a number of governments.
At the LCCM 27 new states participated in the Oslo process for the first time, most of them making explicit statements endorsing the Oslo declaration. After three days of substantive work, the shape of the new treaty emerged with some clarity and there was clear momentum towards an outcome in 2008.
There was broad consensus on the essential elements of a new treaty and the need for articles on victim assistance, clearance, stockpile destruction, international cooperation and assistance, and transparency measures, including deadlines for clearance and stockpile destruction.
The draft text is largely modelled on the Mine Ban Treaty, and there were encouraging discussions on ways to improve the language based on the past eight years of experience, including a separate article on victim assistance based on a human rights approach.
Hungary announced a moratorium on the use, transfer and production of cluster munitions. Peru announced an initiative for a Latin American Cluster Munition Free Zone. Costa Rica invited delegates to a regional meeting 23-24 August to work towards this goal.
In the first session of the conference a number of European states rallied behind a French proposal to push the definition discussion to the beginning of the agenda. This group of states (Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK) joined by several others (Australia, Japan, Poland, Slovakia, and Spain) shared approaches to certain contentious issues during the meeting—most notably a technical fix approach exempting broad categories
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