Policy

The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan has not acceded to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Jordan is not known to have made any statements on the ban convention in 2013 or the first half of 2014. Previously, in September 2012, Jordan’s Prince Mired Ben Raad Zeid al-Hussein informed States Parties that “We realize and appreciate the importance of the Convention on Cluster Munitions even though we are not yet a State Party. Hopefully circumstances will change some time in the not too distant future and we will be able to join.”[1] Mired, who serves as special envoy for the Mine Ban Treaty, informed States Parties in November 2010, that Jordan will continue to support the convention “from the sidelines,” but said, “we have yet to decide if and when we can join.”[2]

Jordan participated in two meetings of the Oslo Process that created the Convention on Cluster Munitions, but did not attend the formal negotiations in Dublin in May 2008, even as an observer.[3]

Jordan has continued to show interest in the ban convention. It participated in an international conference on cluster munitions in Santiago, Chile in June 2010 and has attended every Meeting of States Parties of the convention as an observer, except the Fourth Meeting of States Parties in Lusaka, Zambia in September 2013. Jordan has never participated in the convention’s intersessional meetings in Geneva, such as those held in April 2014.

Jordan voted in favor of UN General Assembly (UNGA) Resolution 68/182 on 18 December 2013, which expressed “outrage” at the Syrian government’s “continued widespread and systematic gross violations of human rights…including those involving the use of…cluster munitions.”[4]

Jordan is a State Party to the Mine Ban Treaty. Jordan is party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons.

Use, production, transfer, and stockpiling

Jordan is not known to have used or produced cluster munitions, but it has imported the weapons. The current status and content of Jordan’s stockpile of cluster munitions is not known.

The United States (US) transferred 31,704 artillery projectiles (M509A1, M483) containing more than 3 million dual-purpose improved conventional munition (DPICM) submunitions to Jordan in 1995.[5] According to US export records, Jordan also imported 200 CBU-71 and 150 Rockeye cluster bombs at some point between 1970 and 1995.[6] Jordan is also reported to possess the Hydra-70 air-to-surface unguided rocket system, but it is not known if the ammunition types available to it include the M261 Multi-Purpose Submunition rocket.[7]