Qatar participates in an international symposium in Brussels on "A world without nuclear testing"
H.E. Sheikh / Ali Bin Jassim Al Thani, Qatar's Ambassador to the Republic of Austria and Permanent Representative to the UN Organizations in Vienna, participated in an international symposium held in Brussels entitled "Towards a Nuclear Test-Free World: Meeting the Commitments".
Senior European and international officials, including H.E. Mr. Didier Reynders, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign and European Affairs of Belgium, H.E. Mr. Lassina Zerbo, Executive Secretary of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization (CTBTO) in Vienna, and ambassadors of a number of countries of the world spoke at the symposium.
In the course of the symposium, organized jointly by the Belgian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Belgian Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations, the world took an important step 20 years ago to ban nuclear testing forever when the CTBT was opened to end all nuclear explosions, under the control of a new international organization.
The participants expressed the hope that eight major States would join the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (CTBT) until the Treaty entered into force at a time when almost all States were respecting the moratorium on nuclear testing, with the exception of the North Korean Republic.
The participants in the Symposium explained that, despite the delay in the implementation of the Treaty, it remained an indispensable tool in the international non-proliferation regime, where the prohibition of nuclear testing was a necessary step on the road to a world free of nuclear weapons.
For his part, H.E. Sheikh / Ali bin Jassim Al-Thani stressed during the symposium the commitment of the State of Qatar to prevent the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the world, particularly nuclear weapons, and its keenness to adhere to the relevant treaties. It was one of the first signatories to the Biological Weapons Convention 1975, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons in 1989, the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty in 1999, the Nuclear Safeguards Agreement and the Small Quantities Protocol in 2009.
During the Brussels Symposium, discussions were held on ways to effectively end nuclear-weapon explosions and the role of the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization in ensuring the absence of a nuclear explosion through the use of its network of observation centers located worldwide, as well as collecting scientific data and providing the necessary information to warn against hurricanes and earthquakes.