We welcome the inclusion of this section on weapons reviews. New Zealand believes weapons reviews, including article 36 reviews, will continue to play an important role in weapons development. Our overarching comment is that we think consideration should be given to making these reviews more robust, as part of strengthening the framework around AWS. We are open to what exactly this might look like, but a key objective would be to ensure veracity and international confidence in reviews. We support the concrete proposals in the current paper as moving in this direction and appreciate the work that has been undertaken by the ICRC and others to move this work forward already. Importantly, as many others have also stressed, New Zealand sees the strengthening of weapons reviews as complementary to parallel efforts to agree regulations and controls on AWS. …
In this regard, we wonder if there might be appetite for the idea of publishing these reviews, and whether states might be open to establishing a central depository to collect and publish them.
New Zealand comments on Chair’s paper (August 2021)
