On October 30, 2018, the UN Human Rights Committee (HRC) adopted a new General comment No. 36 (2018) on article 6 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), on the right to life, which concludes that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is incompatible with the Right to Life and may amount to a crime under international law.
In addition the HRC affirmed that States parties to the ICCPR, which includes almost all countries in the world, must refrain from developing, producing, testing, acquiring, stockpiling, selling, transferring and using nuclear weapons, as well as take action to destroy existing stockpiles, pursue negotiations to achieve global nuclear disarmament, and provide adequate reparation to victims of nuclear weapons testing or use.
Following the adoption of General Comment 36, Basel Peace Office and various partners have made submissions on nuclear weapons policies of some of the nuclear armed and allied states that have come up for review in various UN treaty bodies, in particular the Human Rights Committee (for review of the ICCPR), the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (for review of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women) and the Human Rights Council (for the Universal Periodic Review which includes human rights obligations from all human rights treaties and the UN Charter).
There are both general values of such submissions and specific ones (potentially).
First, these submissions raise the issue of nuclear weapons and human rights amongst the general human rights community, building connections with the nuclear disarmament movement and strengthening nuclear abolition campaigns.
Second, when the relevant human rights bodies pick up on specific questions and recommendations in submissions, then the countries under review are obliged to respond. This places additional legal and political pressure on the states. In most cases involving other human rights issues, countries take action to bring their policies and practices in line with the recommendations raised by the relevant bodies, or at least to appear as though they are doing so. To date, the questions/recommendations in BPO and partners' submissions have not been picked up by the relevant treaty bodies. From 2022 onwards we are planning more intensive advocacy campaigns with the aim to change this.
Submissions by BPO and partners have so far been on:
In preparing these submissions we have worked in consultation with the Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy and Western States Legal Foundation who have made submissions for the Universal Periodic Review of the United States (with the Association of Swiss Lawyers for Nuclear Disarmament / SAFNA, a member of Basel Peace Office), and for the ICCPR Reviews of North Korea, Russia and France (with the International Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms, Japan Association of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms and SAFNA).