… I would like to focus on the first part and the following three questions. The first question is key and the most important word there is the word insure. Because I don’t think that legal reviews by themselves cannot ensure compliance with IHL. It can be indeed a very important tool to do that. But then I move to the second part of your questions, and the chapeau before the questions already demonstrates one of the problems related to legal reviews of weapons. It refers to the national level, and a legal review is being done without any international standard that exists. And also, there’s a reference to that features and capabilities deemed legal or illegal by others, but it’s not really the features or capabilities, I think it’s the specific use or employment of the weapon may be deemed illegal by some national standards and illegal by others, because we do not have common standards. And, in addition, there’s another problem that is related to all of this. And this is connected to the delicate nature of weapons reviews. They’re not always very transparent. We do not know what types of weapon systems or actions have been determined by country illegal or illegal. So there’s a problem of a trust related to legal reviews. So these are my very brief comments related to your first set of questions.
Statement by Ecuador under agenda item 5, topic 5 (9 March 2023, transcript)
