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World Landmine News
Countries need faster landmine clearance: Red Cross - Reuters
Countries must speed efforts to meet a key deadline on clearing anti-personnel weapons, which maim and kill thousands of people every year, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Monday.
Philip Spoerri, the ICRC's director for international law, said the clock was ticking for heavily mined countries such as Bosnia-Herzegovina, Mozambique and Nicaragua, which pledged to remove all mines by 2009.
"In just two and a half years, the first of the convention's deadlines for clearance of anti-personnel mines will have passed," Spoerri told a meeting of signatory states to the Convention on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Mines, also known as the Ottawa Convention.
"Better planning, renewed political commitment and more resources will be required" for the first wave of countries to meet the obligations, he said.
Some 151 countries have ratified or acceded to the treaty, which was signed in the Canadian capital in 1997. The United States is among 44 states which have not joined.
Activists say it is critical that momentum not be lost in the drive to abolish landmines, estimated to have killed or injured more than 7,000 people last year, mostly children.
"We expect states to make every effort to ensure that mine clearance deadlines are met," said Stuart Maslen of the Landmine Monitor mine action team.
"If all mines are not taken out of the ground in the shortest possible time, the world envisaged by the mine ban treaty will remain a promise on paper for all those whose lives are blighted by the presence of landmines," he said.
Some 22 countries -- among them Croatia, Jordan, Yemen, Peru, Uganda and Thailand -- are committed to the 2009 target. Others face later deadlines, depending on the date they signed up to the treaty.
Macedonia announced on Monday that it has fully complied with the treaty's clearance requirements ahead of schedule, an ICRC spokeswoman said.
Signatory states meeting at the U.N.'s European headquarters will this week discuss progress to date in clearing mined lands and ensuring adequate help for surviving mine victims, many of whom are maimed after stepping on the hidden weapons.
The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), a network of more than 1,200 non-governmental groups, said it hoped that if any clearance extensions were necessary, they would only be for the shortest time possible.
Posted: Monday, September 18, 2006
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