5 January 2005 - Green Euro-MP Caroline Lucas has renewed her commitment to a complete ban on all nuclear weapons ahead of a UN-sponsored nuclear disarmament conference taking place in New York later this year.

Dr Lucas, a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) National Council as well as Green Party MEP for South-East England, has signed the ‘Declaration for a Nuclear Weapon Free World’ which hopes to attract millions of signatures before May’s seventh Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference.

She said: “The ‘official’ nuclear states – the UK, France, the US, Russia and China – have all made legal commitments to dismantle their nuclear arsenals, but none have done so.

“The reality is, in fact, just the opposite: both the US and UK are developing a new range of weapons using nuclear technology, in complete defiance of their obligations under the NPT, and in the run-up to the Iraq war Defence secretary Geoff Hoon pointedly refused to rule out a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Saddam.”

She added: “I have signed this declaration as, in this 60^th anniversary year of the devastating nuclear strikes on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, we have an opportunity to use the five-yearly NPT Review conference as a catalyst for real progress on nuclear disarmament.

“The challenge we all face is to harness the outpouring of public and private grief and sympathy over the Boxing Day tsunamis to rid the earth of potential causes of the next disaster once and for all.”

All five official nuclear states are among the 188 to have committed themselves to disarmament since the NPT was opened for signature in 1968. In 1996 the International Court of Justice in The Hague ruled that this commitment was a legal obligation, and in 2000 all five pledged, again, to eliminate their nuclear arsenals.

The New York conference is the seventh five-yearly review of the states parties progress towards meeting their commitments to non-proliferation and disarmament under the NPT.

The European Parliament – the EU’s only directly-elected institution – voted last year to call on all EU member states to make a positive contribution to the New York conference – and its nuclear states, France and the UK, to begin the process of nuclear disarmament.

Dr Lucas, a veteran peace campaigner who addressed the million-plus crowd at the anti-Iraq war demonstration on London in 2003 and was arrested for obstruction during a peaceful blockade of the Faslane Trident nuclear submarine base in 2001, said:

“A majority of MEPs from all parties and EU member countries adopted Green Party calls to fully implement the NPT and restated their expectation that France and the UK would ‘engage actively with the issue to make further progress towards reducing and eliminating nuclear weapons’.

“The Declaration for a Nuclear-Free World is an opportunity for voters and citizens around the world to add their voices to the growing calls for the complete abolition of nuclear weapons and I urge everyone concerned about the threat posed nuclear weapons to sign it at www.abolition2000europe.org .”