Topic: 2024-Indiscriminate Weapons
Country: Belgium
Delegate Name: Nicole Schafer
Delegate: Nicole Schafer
Country: Belgium
Committee: DISEC
Topic: Indiscriminate Weapons
Indiscriminate weapons can be a confusing term in our complicated world. These are usually regarded as weapons that cannot be specifically directed at military personnel and may cause harm to civilians as well. For example, these can be bombs over enemy territory, hoping to hit a military base but also hurting others. The UN has worked on finding solutions to these horrifying weapons through their Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, which they started enforcing in 1983 and meet up for every five years. The purpose of this convention is “to ban or restrict the use of specific types of weapons that are considered to cause unnecessary or unjustifiable suffering to combatants or to affect civilians indiscriminately” (UN). As of 2023, 126 countries have acceded to or ratified the Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons.
The country of Belgium recognizes the seriousness of these indiscriminate weapons and openly rebukes the use of them. In the Belgium Law on Serious Violations in 2003, in Article 8, we prohibit “employing weapons, projectiles and material and methods of warfare which are of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering or which are inherently indiscriminate in violation of the international law of armed conflict.” Even though Belgium is a mostly non-militarial nation, we see the negatives of indiscriminate weapons and firmly
condemn them.
Belgium has been working towards solutions, particularly with fellow European nations. They have made laws regarding economic investments in prohibited weapon, banning “manufacture, use, repair, exhibition for purpose of selling, sale, distribution, import or export, warehousing or transport of anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions, and/or inert munitions or armor plating containing depleted uranium or any other type of industrial uranium.” (Laws Prohibiting Investments) If companies do participate in these actions, federal funding through loans or bonds will be cut off. This is a process our country is still working on, but we believe it’s something every nation should look toward and promote,
Sources:
https://cjad.nottingham.ac.uk/documents/implementations/pdf/Belgium_Serious_Violations_of_International_Humanitarian_Law__2003.pdf
https://disarmament.unoda.org/the-convention-on-certain-conventional-weapons/
https://maint.loc.gov/law/help/controversial-weapons/investments-controversial-weapons.pdf
