UK: UK evades planned cluster bomb ban by "creative" renaming
01 October 2007
According to the human rights organisations Oxfam, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and Landmine Action, the UK, the world's third largest user of lethal cluster bombs over the last ten years, has renamed one of its two remaining cluster munitions in an effort to beat an expected worldwide ban next year. Cluster bomblets are notoriously unreliable and many fail to explode on impact, remaining a lethal hazard to civilians months after the initial attack. Even under test conditions, around 6% of these bombs malfunction.
London Director of Human Rights Watch, Tom Porteous, said that "Human Rights Watch's investigations in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Lebanon have all shown that cluster munitions, no matter how sophisticated, do not work as advertised, and instead get used in ways that violate international humanitarian law." In December last year Hillary Benn, the then Secretary of State for International Development, said that cluster munitions "represent a threat to aid-workers, peace-keepers, medical services, internally-displaced persons" after the cessation of hostilities. In July 2007 an opinion poll showed 82% of the British public are in favour of a cluster bomb ban.
The move would mean that the Hydra CRV-7 rocket system, which can deliver 171 "M73" bomblets from a helicopter-mounted rocket pod, would remain part of British arsenals. As recently as 23 November 2006, the government listed the CRV-7 as a cluster munition. But on 16 July this year, just months after it said it would back a worldwide cluster bomb ban, the Government said the CRV-7 was no longer a cluster bomb.
Ten years after it championed a treaty banning landmines the UK has a chance to do the same with cluster bombs – but instead it is spinning a cluster bomb con," said Simon Conway, Director of Landmine Action. "This is a deeply cynical move. The UK Government needs to announce an immediate end to the use of these indiscriminate killers.
US forces used the rocket-delivered M73 bomblets in Iraq in 2003. Human Rights Watch reported contamination by unexploded bomblets left behind after the strikes.
Press release Oxfam, Amnesty International UK, Human Rights Watch, Saferworld, 18.9.07. There is more informationon: http://www.landmineaction.org/resources/resource.asp?resID=1082