The tiny Marshall Islands are scheduled tomorrow to seek to convince the UN’s highest court to take up a lawsuit against India, Pakistan and Britain which they accuse of failing to halt the nuclear arms race.
Lawyers representing the Pacific island nation are to launch the opening salvos in a David-versus-Goliath battle in which the International Court of Justice is to examine whether it is competent to hear lawsuits against India and Pakistan.
A third hearing against Britain, scheduled for Wednesday, is to be devoted to “preliminary objections” raised by London.
In 2014, the Marshall Islands — a Pacific Ocean territory with 72,000 people — accused nine nations of “not fulfilling their obligations with respect to the cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament.”
They included China, Britain, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia and the US. The Marshall Islands maintained that by not stopping the nuclear arms race, the nine nations continued to breach their obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — even if the treaty has not been by signed by countries such as India and Pakistan.
However, the court only admitted three cases brought against Britain, India and Pakistan because they already recognized the International Court’s authority.
The Marshall Islands decided to sue the world’s nuclear heavyweights as “it has a particular awareness of the dire consequences of nuclear weapons,” it said.
Between 1946 and 1958 the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, Majuro’s representatives said in papers filed in court.
While also focusing on the threat of global warming causing the world’s oceans to rise, the Marshall Islands “have come to realize that it cannot ignore the other major threat to its survival: the ongoing threat posed by the existence of large arsenals of nuclear weapons.”
In March 2014, the Marshall Islands marked 60 years since the devastating hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll, that vaporized an island and exposed thousands in the surrounding area to radioactive fallout.
“The Marshall Islands wants a moral and judicial pronouncement that can strengthen their political campaign against nuclear weapons,” The Hague Institute for Global Justice think tank’s Rule of Law program head Lyal Sunga said.
“It’s very interesting because international law, as part of a range of diplomatic and political tools, can be used to lend weight to the argument that nuclear testing is very dangerous and harmful not only for the Marshall Islands, but for the whole world,” he said.
The 15-megaton test on March 1, 1954, was part of the intense Cold War nuclear arms race and 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Bikini Islanders have lived in exile since they were moved for the first weapons tests in 1946.
When US government scientists declared Bikini Island safe for resettlement, some residents were allowed to return in the early 1970s.
However, they were removed again in 1978 after ingesting high levels of radiation from eating local foods grown on the former test site.
Now the Marshall Islands aims to shine a new spotlight on the nuclear threat.
The court case is to start days after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un’s order on Friday last week for the country’s nuclear arsenal to be readied for preemptive use at any time.
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