I just want to say that I'm
very happy that I'm a member of the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. I have been
working on nuclear disarmament for a
long time and I was very aware of the
role of Reaching Critical Will (the WILPF disarmament program) was having
at United Nations and so when we
decided that it would be good to have a
WILPF branch in Scotland I was very keen to be part of that.
The very first resolution of the United Nations was to desist from the use of atomic energy
as a weapon of war, and it's important to
recognize that the two issues that the
Women's International League for Peace and Freedom has always had at its core
the upholding of human rights and
women's ability to be part of the
process of speaking out and making decisions, and the idea that there must be a better
way than engaging in bloody conflict to
resolve international disputes and so
WILPF had a very important part in the
establishment of the League of Nations
and eventually the United Nations and so
it's no surprise that that first
resolution and WILPFs consultative
status in the United Nations is embedded
right from the very get-go.  So why
would you say that nuclear weapons need
to be banned?  There's a history of weapons that are regarded as completely
unacceptable, even if you
aren't a pacifist, even if you still
believe that the use of force is
justified in some cases.  Even as far back
as 1899 they recognized that dum-dum
bullets were really just a step too far
they just weren't fair.  They were
indiscriminate, they
couldn't control who they were likely to
injure, and so the process of
banning indiscriminate weapons for
humanitarian reasons is intrinsic to the
use of a weapon at times of war, or it should be, but it took till 2017 before we finally
managed to achieve the good news of a nuclear weapons ban 
treaty.   A lot of that was done
through the work of the International
Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
which came together.  It  was founded in Melbourne Australia although the
ideas behind it were endemic in nuclear
disarmament campaigning all over the
world.  But I think from the outset people
had felt that they had to attach their
campaigning to making change in their
own government and it was the idea that
we could work collectively across the
world and recognize that all nuclear
weapons policies have been decided in
secret by men.  I say that without any
hesitation whatsoever.  The decision to
adopt nuclear weapons and develop them
has been undertaken secretly without
democratic mandate by small
groups of men.  So we need a different
way of tackling that, we need to look at
the democratic deficit that exists
across the world with regard to these
weapons.  So that was really what ICAN set out to do and it now has 440
partner organizations in 100 countries - 
it keeps going up, I have to keep
changing the slides. It's a campaign not
to gain a ban treaty, that we ban
nuclear weapons - it's a campaign to abolish nuclear
weapons.  It's an elimination campaign,
were not finished.  Reaching Critical Will
has had a hugely important part in it
and particularly since 2010, but Reaching
Critical Will became very very
influential in managing and negotiating
the involvement of NGOs nongovernmental
organizations from across the world in
participating in negotiations at United
Nations.  That was of enormous
importance because it kept the focus on
what we wanted to talk about
so Ban Ki Moon, the NPT negotiations
being a complete disaster zone the
NPT I'm sure you know all this
has got key pillars - it says well the
nuclear weapon states will get rid of
their nuclear weapons which they haven't
done in exchange for a promise that
non-nuclear weapon states won't aquire
nuclear weapons which is gone from
two to five to nine, so that bit hasn't really worked, and
everybody can have nuclear power but
that wasn't actually the original
intention, it was atomic energy for
peaceful uses which in my book is something
like X-rays.  So the NPT for my money
was a good try, a good start, but it
failed to achieve its objectives. And the
argument has always been based on some
ideas about political security and then
the International Red Cross and Red
Crescent which is a partner organization
in ICAN
came up with this resolution at the same
time as Ban Ki Moon was saying
you guys in your NPT get your act
together you've got to do something a bit
stronger than this
and this is what they said
"Incalculable human suffering" - they said
that the International Red Cross & Red
Crescent could not respond if we go
wrong. You know you can have a tsunami
you can have a major earthquake you know
you can have a civil war you can have
all sorts of disasters across the planet
and the International Red Cross and Red
Crescent will be there picking up the
pieces helping people.  Go to a
nuclear major accident or a conflict and
you're stuck they can't do it that's
what they were saying.  And this term "catastrophic humanitarian consequences"
meant that people really began to sit up
and pay attention and some of the
world's governments chose to really
explore that and this is a picture of
Bill from Scotland an MSP and some
other Scottish campaigners at the very
first of those conferences which was
hosted by Oslo and there were 120
of the world's governments turned up to
that which gives some indication of how
worried the international community
was about what the crazies
that the nuclear weapons were
likely to cause to happen to our planet
So they had three of these
conferences, and they were all hosted by
different countries, and the thing that
really came out of the conferences
was this business about there is no
effective humanitarian response possible
you know you're really stuffed and that
was even more the case now than it was
during the height of the Cold War in the
1980s because at that time we didn't
have the internet and we weren't completely
dependent on that form of communication
to do just about anything so if you
talking about a nuclear exchange you're
talking about taking that 
infrastructure out and the other big
change that makes it even worse is what
we now know about climate change and you
talk about your carbon footprint
well what do you think is going to happen if you chuck an entire
city
carbonized into the atmosphere.
So no effective humanitarian response
and the NPT wasn't working because
there's a big legal gap right in the
middle of it particularly when it comes
to disarmament.  There's an idea about
disarming in good faith at some time and it's
its not fit for purpose.  And
so it was decided at that stage the
United Nations went OK world
countries let's get this sorted, we'll have a
conference and we'll see who comes to it
we'll make it open to all Member States and
we'll discuss how we can progress
nuclear disarmament and meet everybody's
security concerns.  So they set up this
it was mandated in 2015 and it went
on for quite a long time and reported in
October 2016 and the conference took
place in different parts, there were these quite lengthy sessions.
That's me being Scottish WILPF at the conference, and I'd like to say just a little bit about that,
I was very nervous I knew I was going to
get to make a presentation and I had the
full weight of responsibility on my shoulders
and I was thinking about WILPF, and the
stuff about the disproportionate impact of
ionizing radiation on women and girls
very much in my mind the very macho
discourse of such a sexist nature
that equates
power and strength in such a negative way
that gives a background to make
it possible to develop policies that are
supportive of nuclear weapons.
The people I was staying with
were Quakers, I'm a Quaker...
the people I was staying with, the guy was the
archivist for the United Nations ... office
and he came in he said Oh I think
you'd be interested in this, Janet, and
he showed me the photograph and it
was a photograph of a bunch of women
loads of them, there were about a couple of
hundred women, from across Switzerland
and France who had come to the very
building that we were meeting in, in
Geneva, and they had come with prams and
toddlers and children and they were
there to object in the early 1960s
to French atomic testing.  And he
had a great big banner that he put up
and it said "We have had enough",
and I thought .... they had enough in 1960 .. where are we going with this
so I based my presentation on that.  I was enormously proud of being able to
do that and make that intervention.
At the same time as this none of the other
nuclear-armed States showed up at this
they said it was a piece of nonsense it
wasn't gonna work, it was
not worth coming to, the NPT was the way to go,
and didn't we know we were naive, and Mat
Rowland the British guy actually said that
we were naive and ignorant of
true international security policies if
we thought a ban treaty was going to
do any good, so they weren't going to come. But
actually they knew fine well that a ban
treaty was a good idea and it was going to
work.  So the United States government
sent this - it's a Non-Letter - which was
sent out to all their NATO allies.  "The
effects of a treaty to ban nuclear
weapons could degrade enduring security
relations"   Yes that's the general idea!
"It could impact on non-parties
[that's people that don't sign it], as well
as parties even prior to its entry into force". 
Yes it would, yes it has, yes it does.
Fifty major financial institutions have
disinvested in nuclear technology since
the treaty was signed, before it's even
entered into force, Deutsche Bank for
example.  "It's inconsistent with NATO's
deterrence and defense posture". Yes it is,
and hopefully they'll change it.  
So we went to New York, and I'm
sorry about the Scottishness but I
can't help it I'm very proud of them.
These are the Scottish delegates to the
conference, and I met Taniel there as
well so that was a very big plus.  She was
there from UK WILPF.  But we had a big
score of us from Scotland, it was nearly all
women and they were all WILPF members.
But we were campaigning, we weren't just attending the conference in New York.
That's us out in the rain at one of the
huge demonstrations on the eve of
the negotiations.  An absolutely fabulous occasion.  But we were working very hard in United Nations in the room
talking to diplomats, counting the number
of people that were there, holding side
events - this is a side event - I thought I'd better put in something about the rest of the UK so this is me, Fabian,
and Rebecca Johnson and the familiar face of
Dave Webb from CND, and the lovely Tim Wallis, who used to be
a UK person who has defected
and is now working on the dark side
running a thing called Nuclear Ban dot US, which is an American compliance
campaign which is proving to be
enormously successful.  They have now
got the Californian state legislature to
adopt support for the treaty - that's 12%
of
the population of the United States of
America.  So you know we do have an impact.
But the people that really really made
the difference in the conference - I'm not
going to go into all the stuff about the
lobbying the diplomats 
we did do that and we got them there and
we got them to listen - but what was
really the most significant of all was the
groups of people that really had the
absolute moral authority to be talking
about why we need to ban nuclear weapons.
Sue is an Australian First Nation person
has, had, a daughter of 47 years
of age who died the year before the
conference of cancer having had five
miscarriages.  That's as a result of Sue's
exposure to British testing in Maralinga.
Sitting next to her is Setsuko Therlow
who survived the attack on Hiroshima
and saw her four-year-old nephew turned
to a blackened lump of unrecognizable
flesh who took four days to die.
One of the things that I remember
Setsuko coming to Edinburgh and
speaking to - we decided because she was 13 when it happened we got a bunch
of 13 year olds into a room
and we got them to just listen to her
testimony and one of the things that she
did was she brought out a very long
yellow ribbon which had a lot of Chinese
characters on it and passed it around
the room and everybody held part of it
and she said these are the names of my
classmates who were vaporized, everyone
of them had a name, every one of them was
loved by someone.   So these were the messages
that were being given along with the
messages from the academics and the
experts.  We had wonderful people
from Chatham House, Patricia Lewis, talking
about risk and the increased risk in the
modern world of our Trident modernization
program which is infinitely more
dangerous and prone to accidents than the existing one, it's crazy
and we had the academics and doctors
that have such great expertise on what
the weapons do and how they impact on
people, and climate change experts
talking about how a thermo-nuclear detonation, even a
comparatively small thermo-nuclear detonation
could cause famine across Africa by
affecting the temperature of the country.
So we won!   On the 7th of July, this is the  
wonderful Elayne from Costa Rica who
chaired the  conference and the whole team
you'll see they're all wore white on the
day we signed the treaty.  She knew we
were going to win, and it's the colour
for peace in Costa Rica.
It was absolutely marvellous.
So what is this Treaty?   It's quite difficult sometimes to explain its not
where the government makes the law of the land, and then somebody has a big stick and everybody has got to obey it, and they think that's whats going to happen at UN
It's not.  Those of us in the peace movement and understand
the kind of processes for conflict
resolution that Turning the Tide or ...
it's much like that process
because what it's about - treaty law is
about getting people that think the same
way about something to agree together
that they will make an agreement to
behave in a particular kind of way that
will reduce conflict and allowing their
needs to be met together.  So what we now
need is to have enough people to sign
the treaty to bring it into force.  So it
was very difficult because obviously none 
of the nuclear weapon states showed up and
then they complained that we don't take
their needs into account, which is quite
hard to do they're not there and they're
not participating in the negotiations as
everybody who's ever done any conflict
resolution work knows you need to have
everybody there if you're going to get a
good result.  But we did get a good
enough result - we got 122 member
states of the United Nations committed to this
process.  And then they have to go back
and talk to their people, talk to their
governments, agree to sign it - it's open
for a signature on a certain day - and
then once it's been signed they then have to
do a thing called ratifying it, which just
means putting it through their national
legislation so that a country's leader
can't just sign it and then get voted out 
and have somebody that disagrees with
it a week later.   It's got to be put into
the country's legislation.  So once all
that stuff - and that takes a while - then it
will enter into force and the number
required for this treaty to enter into
force is 50.  So we had more than 50
people sign up the very first day it opened
for signature which is just about a
year ago.  Ratification takes bit longer.
But it does effectively put nuclear
weapons beyond the pale.  And
the ICAN process - people have a
tendency to think of ICAN as an
organization, it's not, it's a network
which we can all be part of and in this
country in the UK, in this state I should
say, there are about 30 ICAN
partners.  In the country of Scotland
there's six
ICAN partner organizations.  And some
of them are the obvious people you
would expect to be in such a thing, but
there's other smaller and
different organizations as well.  So you
could work on the campaign in your own
organization, you can work collectively
with other people, you can come together
for a particular like this rally that
we're going to do in Scotland to mark a
year of the treaty - lots of partner
organizations will come together - but
then they'll be doing it in different
ways.  So when it opened for signature
in Scotland there was a thing called the
Parliamentarian Pledge, and again it's
important to understand that that is not
about members of the Scottish Parliament
being targeted or even members of the UK
Parliament being targeted
it's about parliamentarians across the
whole world agreeing to work together to
get all of the world's governments to
join the treaty. So you can expect a
French parliamentarian like Jean-Marie
to work with us in getting our
government to sign it, you can expect even
though our government hasn't signed it
you can expect parliamentarians from the
Scottish Parliament which is very
committed to it to work with German
parliamentarians to work together on new
provisions for NATO for example.  It's
an international thing.  But we
opened it for signature and that's Paul
Wheelhouse who's a senior
Minister actually signing in the
Scottish Parliament.  So we had a big
ceremony the day that the actual treaty
opened for signature to have a
parliamentarian support the opening for signature and we
actually reflected that in Scotland with
a Citizen's Pledge to support our
parliamentarians as well. So in the South this
is again it's Fabian who signed it and
as a result signing it was allowed to
hold the Nobel Peace Prize.  Because
shortly after the treaty opened for
signature the next big thing was the
International Campaign to Abolish
Nuclear Weapons, which is all of you,
everyone in this room is part of that
campaign to some degree or another we are all Nobel Peace prize winners,
So, that's a picture of me with the Welcome Campaigners banner,  and a wee bit of the campaigner's conference, which we held.
I just want to flag up within
the UK context - I'm not
just being Scottish now - I'm actually
pointing out that the Parliament and the
First Minister of a country which is
it's not just a regional little bit,  it's
not just an opinion it's not a YouGov poll
it's actually a
country which has devolved powers that
has its own Parliament, it has a measurable
and measured concrete response to the
Treaty, and this is what our First
Minister said when
she gave us a special thought to
take to the Nobel Prize, this is what she
said in October when we won that Nobel
Peace Prize: "We will never accept that
a limit should be placed on the
contribution Scotland can make to
building a better world.
Our party stands as part of that global
movement.
We say no to nuclear weapons in the
river Clyde or anywhere else".  And that I
feel is an asset to the campaign in the
UK that is greatly underrated we need to
be using that.  I'm not just saying that
because I'm proud of being Scottish and being
part of it.  I'm saying it is a very
concrete manifestation that when
Mat Rowland opens his mouth and says that
they have a democratic mandate to renew
Trident and when Theresa May answers
a Scottish politician and says she's
willing to annihilate thousands and
thousands of people they do not have a
democratic mandate and they need to be
reminded of this constantly.  All the
weapons are in Scotland they've got
nowhere else they can put them, which is
why we're having this international
demonstration ... it's an important
part of our international work.
This is just
to give a flavor of how the NATO
position is changing, Willy Claess
was the Secretary of NATO has pointed out
that - I'm just reminding people that it's
not actually in the treaty, it may be a
strategic policy but it's not actually
part of the North Atlantic Treaty.  We can
have a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization and choose to make it non
nuclear.
As Taniel has so eloquently
shown, the language of the treaty is
beautiful.  It was written with great care
and love and attention.  It was
written with great consideration being
given to those
NATO countries and others
who found themselves embroiled in the
mechanics of the nuclear-armed behaviors
that challenge and threaten all of us.
And its really a beautifully written
document there is not a phrase in it that
is extra or spare or without meaning. So
read it, take your copy, put it in a
special place, choose a time when there
isn't too much going on. You don't
need to do it all at once.  Read a bit of it, and
try and see where and why that's
come into it. Make it part of your
language and how you describe it. And
ask your MP or your MSP if you're in Scotland to
sign the pledge and I've just got these nice
two little pictures which sum it up  for me
That's really what
I wanted to say in terms of background
and I hope that we can get some good Q&A stuff going
for the rest of this little bit of the session.
Wasn't that a splendid opener.  A brilliant picture - and just so
clear about the process running way back to
1899
of vicious weapons as they've been banned.  So thank you for that ...
So, any questions?  Yes Richard.... Richard Outram from Oldham
Can I just ask a very practical thing, do you actually have a list of MPs and MSPs
that have actually signed the parliamentary
pledge and those that refuse to sign as well
would be useful.
I wouldn't say refuse because I never take no for an answer.  But we certainly have a list of the ones that have signed.
How you utilise that?  Two more questions, any other questions, Phoebe?
Phoebe from Stockport, what about MEPs?  Are they relevant in this context? Sorry? MEPs. Members of the European Parliament.
Yes they are, and they can be asked, and the European Parliament is very supportive of the treaty.
As an example Phoebe Julie Ward who's an MEP here in the North West, is at the moment co-chair of Labour CND.
Ann?  Would Scotland be able to ban having any nuclear weapons on its territory?
Would it be able to it by itself, or can that only be done if the UK government approves?
The position of the Scottish government,
as its a devolved government, it doesn't have
full control over everything there are
certain matters that are reserved to
Westminster, one of them is foreign
policy, one of them is defense, one of
them is weapons of mass destruction, and one of them is nuclear weapons.  They've really got it pretty sewn up.
We are not allowed to play with any of those. Having said that the atmosphere around dialogue
has shifted.  There was a point where
if you even tried to have a debate on the Opinion at Holyrood you'd get slapped down...
so you weren't allowed to talk about that, and its outside your devolved competence, and
we'll take the ball away, and you're not allowed to play at all if you carry on with that sort of chat.
Whereas post-Brexit suddenly were allowed to talk about anything.
I can't remember who said it, it was one of the Scottish MPs, who said there's no other way to unite a room in Scotland than to talk about banning Trident - everyone agrees.
It's quite problematic because we now have to think
of what we can ask them to do because
they've pretty much done they've all
signed that Parliamentarians Pledge, the
entire SNP, the leader of the Scottish
Labour Party, and quite a few Labour MSPs, the entire Green Party in Scotland, which
gives us a ridiculously huge majority of
the Scottish Parliament that have signed the Parliamentarians Pledge - and
most of our MPs have signed it as well. So
there's not really a lot of point in banging on about that in Scotland,
you have to think of other things for them to do.
If Scotland became independent, and if the politics of the Scottish government didn't change drastically, which is very unlikely,
there is absolutely no doubt that that would disarm the UK, because they don't have anywhere else to put it,
they don't have the infrastructure, and they don't have the money to re-develop an infrastructure.
It's just a completely insane situation
and it was a major reason why they pulled out all their top guns to make sure we didn't win the referendum.
OK one last question? No? Yes?
Joan?
I was I think probably sleeping when Taniel first started speaking, and I was very
interested to see those twelve pieces of paper up there,
but where do I get them from?
It's like the context and the intention of the Treaty.  The only thing that isn't in there is the very top left corner on the Law of Proportionality,
its a law of armed conflict, its part of international humanitarian law and it links to when they talk about collateral damage
something like a school was bombed, however there was a
military leader there, and can you argue that
the 50 children who were killed were worth
the death of that military leader. And
that's how collateral damage is argued.  So
that's part of the law of proportionality.  So I've put that because there's a link specifically to
things that are referred to in the treaty.  And I would argue, I think any sane person would argue,
that a nuclear weapon could never ever be argued as being proportional, ever.
