Clearance of cluster munition remnants “still too slow” despite new techniques, according to Mine Action Monitor

Clearing Cluster Munition Remnants, a report launched this week by Mine Action Monitor (www.mineactionmonitor.org), has found that delays in clearance are putting lives of civilians in up to 30 states at risk and making hundreds of thousands of families food-insecure.

The last five years since the Convention was adopted have seen the development of more effective ways to address contamination, especially in south-east Asia (Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia) where millions of cluster munitions were dropped in the 1960s and 1970s. However, actual clearance is still slow. Montenegro and Mozambique should have already completed clearance of affected areas, while Chad, Chile, and Germany have delayed the survey they urgently need to carry out and are failing to meet their legal obligations.

States parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions have up to ten years to survey and clear submunitions that have been fired but which do not detonate on impact with the ground. The first review conference of the Convention on Cluster Munitions meeting in Dubrovnik this week needs to ensure all states finish clearance as quickly as possible.

Only eight states have completed survey and clearance of cluster munition remnants in the last five years: Congo, Grenada, Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Norway, Thailand, Uganda, and Zambia. Convention signatories Angola and Colombia may be in a position to join them but need first to conduct a survey to see if contamination remains. States that have not yet joined the Convention have obligations under international human rights law to clear unexploded submunitions as soon as possible. To speed up the work, the three leading demining organisations in survey and clearance of cluster munition remnants, HALO Trust, Mines Advisory Group, and Norwegian People’s Aid, have decided to work more closely together to solve the problem.

In 2010 and to the end of 2014, more than 255km2 of land (about one-sixth the size of London) was cleared of cluster munition remnants, safely blowing up over 295,000 submunitions. The most affected states globally are Convention parties Laos and Iraq, and states not party Cambodia and Vietnam, all of which have more than 100km2 of contamination to clear. New contamination continues to occur, notably in armed conflicts in Libya, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen.

Survey and clearance are different for submunitions than for landmines. Unlike mines, all submunitions contain a high amount of metal meaning detectors can be set to low sensitivity and cover a suspected area far more quickly (roughly ten times as fast as mine clearance). Cluster munition contamination will always have a “footprint”, the area covered by the submunitions when they hit the ground: some 5,000 to 20,000m2 in size (equivalent to between one and four football pitches).

Mine Action Monitor is an independent research and monitoring endeavour which aims to facilitate the implementation of survey and clearance obligations in the Convention on Cluster Munitions and the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention. Norwegian People’s Aid directly supports the work of Mine Action Monitor, with funding from the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Media contact: Stuart-Casey-Maslen, Editor of Mine Action Monitor, stuartm@npaid.org, Tel: +44 (0)7718 389056