Human Rights Watch again:
Misrata was an increasingly rare example of the use of these weapons, which are comprehensively banned by the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions. The convention has been signed or ratified by 111 nations, including most of the United States’ closest allies–but not the US itself.
Regrettably, the move to eliminate cluster munitions is under attack, with the United States leading the way. The US is touting a much weaker alternative through the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW) – an alternative with much lower standards than US policy already requires.
The CCW proposal would…establish a terrible precedent in international humanitarian law, adopting for the first time an instrument with weaker standards after one with stronger standards has already been embraced by most nations. The trend has been for the law to grow progressively stronger, with ever greater protections for civilians.
…if the US can ban the weapon in 2018, it can do it now.
I see landmines, cluster munitions, and depleted uranium as a triad of weapons fundamentally incompatible with humanitarian purposes, against whose use the US lags far behind much of the rest of the world.
