By Rick Wayman
Big news today out of The Hague and San Francisco. The Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) has filed unprecedented lawsuits against all nine nuclear-armed nations for their failure to negotiate in good faith for nuclear disarmament, as required under the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The suits were filed against all nine nations at the International Court of Justice, with an additional complaint against the United States filed in U.S. Federal District Court.
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation applauds the courage of the RMI’s leaders in bringing lawsuits against the nuclear-armed nations. The people of the RMI continue to suffer today from U.S. nuclear weapon tests that took place on their territory in the 1940s and 1950s, and they want to ensure that such devastation – or worse – is never brought on anyone ever again.
NAPF is playing a key role in the Nuclear Zero Lawsuits campaign, which just launched this morning. Please go to www.nuclearzero.org, where you can learn more about the specifics of the lawsuits and show your support by signing a petition supporting the RMI’s bold, non-violent action.
We’ll be bringing you much more news about these lawsuits in the coming days and weeks. But right now, there are two things I’d like for you to do:
1. Go to nuclearzero.org and sign the petition, and then share it with your friends.
2. Share / re-tweet announcements about the lawsuits from our Facebook and Twitter pages.
These lawsuits could be the thing that finally breaks the nuclear weapon states’ shameful decades of inaction on nuclear disarmament. Please take a moment to add your voice to the campaign today.Φ
[For a Reuters’ account of these proceedings, click here.]
Rick Wayman is the Peace Ops Director for the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.