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Egypt
Mine Ban Policy
Mine ban policy overview
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Mine Ban Treaty status |
State not party |
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Pro-mine ban UNGA voting record |
Abstained on Resolution 67/32 on 3 December 2012, as in all previous years |
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Participation in Mine Ban Treaty meetings |
Attended the Twelfth Meeting of States Parties to the Mine Ban Treaty in December 2012 |
After a popular revolution caused the collapse of the government led by Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, the country was ruled by a military council, the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Elections to select a new parliament took place in November 2011.[1] Mohammed Morsi was elected president on 24 June 2012 and deposed by a military coup a year later, on 3 July 2013.
Policy
The Arab Republic of Egypt has not acceded to the Mine Ban Treaty. Egypt has often stated its reasons for opposing the treaty, including that antipersonnel landmines are seen as a key means for securing its borders and that responsibility for clearance is not assigned in the treaty to those who laid the mines in the past.[2] In December 2012, Egypt objected to the “particularly imbalanced nature of that instrument, which was developed and concluded outside the framework of the United Nations.”[3]
Egypt participated as an observer in the Twelfth Meeting of States Parties to the Mine Ban Treaty in Geneva in December 2012, but did not attend the intersessional Standing Committee meetings in May 2013.
Egypt signed the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) in 1981 but never ratified it. It attended, as an observer, the Fourteenth Annual Conference of State Parties to CCW Amended Protocol II on landmines in November 2012.
In a February 2013 letter to Egypt’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mohamed Kamel Amr, Human Rights Watch urged the new government to reconsider its stance on antipersonnel mines and undertake an interdepartmental review of the policy on joining the Mine Ban Treaty that has prevailed so far. No reply had been received as of September 2013.
Production, transfer, stockpiling, and use
Egypt has stated that it stopped production of antipersonnel mines in 1988 and stopped exports in 1984.[4]
At the First Review Conference of the Mine Ban Treaty in December 2004, Egypt’s Deputy Assistant Foreign Minister stated that “the Egyptian government has imposed a moratorium on all export and production activities related to anti-personnel mines.”[5] This was the first time that Egypt publicly and officially announced a moratorium on production.[6] The Monitor is not aware of any official decrees or laws to implement permanent prohibitions on production or export of antipersonnel mines. In December 2012, Egypt said that it “imposed a moratorium on its capacity to produce and export landmines in 1980.”[7]
Egypt is believed to have a large stockpile of antipersonnel mines, but no details are available on the size and composition of the stockpile, as it is considered a state secret.
In July 2012, a retired military engineer, General Mohamed Khater, who was formerly in charge of mine clearance in the engineering corps, reportedly stated that the Egyptian Armed Forces laid a minefield in 2011 on the country’s border with Libya, presumably when forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi lost control of the border to anti-Gaddafi resistance fighters.[8] The Monitor has not been able to verify this claim.[9]
[1] Before it was disbanded, the parliament adopted a series of recommendations of its defense and national security committee to the government; these included tasking the armed forces to prepare a study for landmine clearance (and its costs to be allocated in the new government’s general budget) in order to study Egypt’s position on the existing related international conventions regarding clearance and compensation from those who laid mines, and also to accelerate the mine clearance operation in the northern coast of Egypt (including marking of areas not yet cleared). Nermen Abdelzaher, “The Parliament Agreed on the Defense and National Security Committee Recommendations to the Government,” Al Ahram (daily Arabic newspaper), Cairo, 8 May 2012.
[2] Egypt explained its abstention in voting on UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 65/48 in December 2010 as, “Egypt views this convention as lacking balance between the humanitarian consideration related to APLM [antipersonnel landmine] and their legitimate military use for border protection. Most importantly, the convention does not acknowledge the legal responsibility of States for demining APLM they themselves have laid, in particular in territories of other States, making it almost impossible for affected States to meet alone the Convention’s demining requirements….The mentioned weaknesses are only complemented by the weak international cooperation system of the Convention which remains limited in its effect and much dependent on the will of donor States. The mentioned weaknesses of Ottawa convention have kept the largest world producers and some of the world’s most heavily affected States outside its regime, making the potential for its universality questionable and reminding us all of the value of concluding arms-control and disarmament agreements in the context of United Nations and not outside its framework.” Statement of Egypt, “Explanation of Vote on Resolution on the Ottawa APLM Convention, L.8,” UNGA First Committee, New York, 27 October 2010.
[3] Statement of Egypt, “Explanation of Vote on Resolution on the Ottawa APLM Convention, L.8,” UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 December 2012, www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com12/eov/L8_Egypt.pdf.
[4] Statement of Egypt, Mine Ban Treaty Seventh Meeting of States Parties, Geneva, 22 September 2006; and statement of Egypt, “Explanation of Vote on Resolution on the Ottawa APLM Convention, L.8,” UNGA First Committee, New York, 27 October 2010.
[5] Statement of Egypt, Mine Ban Treaty First Review Conference, Nairobi, 2 December 2004.
[6] Egypt told a UN assessment mission in February 2000 that it ceased export of antipersonnel mines in 1984 and ended production in 1988, and several Egyptian officials over the years also told the Monitor informally that production and trade had stopped. However, Egypt has not responded to repeated requests by the Monitor to make that position formal and public in writing. The Monitor has therefore kept Egypt on its list of producers. Egypt reportedly produced two types of low metal content blast antipersonnel mines, several variations of bounding fragmentation mines, and a Claymore-type mine. There is no publicly available evidence that Egypt has produced or exported antipersonnel mines in recent years. See Landmine Monitor Report 2004, p. 957.
[7] Statement of Egypt, “Explanation of Vote on Resolution on the Ottawa APLM Convention, L.8,” UNGA First Committee, New York, 2 December 2012, www.reachingcriticalwill.org/images/documents/Disarmament-fora/1com/1com12/eov/L8_Egypt.pdf.
[8] Ashraf Abouelhoul, “Continue to look after smuggled weapons from Libya,” Al Ahram, 19 July 2012.
[9] Only one newspaper article carried the reported information and there has been no substantiation from observers on the ground in either Egypt or Libya. The Egyptian government has not commented on the matter.
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