Reacting to the Lithuanian Parliament’s decision to withdraw from the Convention on Cluster Munitions, Dinushika Dissanayake, Amnesty International’s Deputy Regional Director of Research in Europe, said:
„The Lithuanian Parliament’s decision to leave the Convention on Cluster Munitions is a disastrous and troubling shift. This move abandons the global consensus aimed at minimising civilian harm during armed conflict and undermines decades of progress on eliminating the production, transfer and use of inherently indiscriminate weapons.“
„Cluster munitions are inherently indiscriminate weapons which pose a grave threat to civilian lives long after a conflict has ended. Their use has devastating consequences, as many systems have an extraordinarily high ’dud’ rate, up to 20%, contaminating large areas with unexploded ordnance for years or even decades. Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the use of inherently indiscriminate weapons, and intentionally launching indiscriminate attacks that kill or injure civilians constitutes a war crime,“ says Dinushika Dissanayake.
„The Lithuanian Parliament must urgently reconsider its withdrawal from the Convention on Cluster Munitions – a treaty designed to protect civilians – and instead continue the active support for the convention it has demonstrated since ratification,“ says Amnesty International’s representative.
The Convention on Cluster Munitions, which entered into force on 1 August 2010, has 112 states parties, with 12 signatories. It bans the use, production, stockpiling and transfer of cluster munitions, among others. Lithuania would become the first country to withdraw from the Convention since its adoption in 2008.
Cluster munitions are small submunitions which are launched and dispersed by rockets, artillery, and/or air-dropped containers, scattering ordnance over a wide area, sometimes as large as a football pitch. Unexploded munitions become de facto mine fields, blighting regions for years.