The Diplomat
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, met yesterday by videoconference with the other fifteen ministers of the countries participating in the Stockholm Initiative to study actions to strengthen the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) regime.
At this meeting, the participants approved a roadmap for the coming months and renewed their commitment to the objectives agreed at the previous meetings in Stockholm and Berlin.
Minister González Laya offered to hold a meeting in Madrid at the end of spring or early summer to take stock and coordinate the actions to be carried out in the run-up to the Review Conference, which will take place in August 2021, according to a statement issued by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
The meeting was co-chaired from Amman (Jordan) by the host, Jordanian minister Ayman Safadi, and his counterparts from Sweden, Anne Linde, and Germany, Heiko Maas. It was attended by the 16 states that are part of the Stockholm Initiative: Argentina, Canada, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, South Korea, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland.
The NPT, a key part of the international architecture of non-proliferation and nuclear arms control, will hold its tenth Review Conference in August at which the States Parties will negotiate new measures to contribute to achieving a world without nuclear weapons under an international verification regime. Originally scheduled for 2020, the year in which the 50th anniversary of the entry into force of the NPT was reached, the Conference had to be postponed owing to the pandemic.
The Stockholm Initiative emerged in 2019 to pool the efforts of 16 countries convinced of the need to progress in nuclear disarmament from a realistic and pragmatic perspective that takes into account the current geopolitical context and the different sensitivities that exist. Four ministerial meetings were held in this framework and served to agree on concrete actions aimed at giving impetus to the NPT Review Conference.
