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From Monthly Paper Hidankyo - April 2000

NGO Millennium Forum starts May 22

NGO Millennium Forum will be held from May 22 to 26 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
Hidankyo joins in the Forum as members of a joint delegation of "Message of Hiroshima and Nagasaki" Network.
In February, Hidankyo sent a letter to the Secretariat of the Millennium Forum, in which it requested that three proposals will be discussed at the Forum.

The three proposals are:
1. The continuing existence of nuclear weapons, the menace caused by them, and accidental, miscalculated or intentional use of those weaponspose serious threat to the survival of the entire humanity and all lives on earth. The abolition of nuclear weapons is the most urgent task for securing a peaceful 21st century. We request that this task will form the keynote of the whole of the Forum and be discussed as the task of highest priority.

2. The use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people, and has left the survivors with aftereffects from radiation and fear for their possible outbreak. Moreover, in the process of production and testing, nuclear weapons have produced many radiation victims in different parts of the world, who are compelled to face nuclear terror in their living even today.
We call on the NGOs to urge the United Nations to conduct investigation into actual conditions of all nuclear victims and make public its result. We also call on the UN and NGOs to bring the case of nuclear victims to the UN Human Rights Commission as the violation of human rights of the victims, and urge the states concerned to take relief measures for them.

3. We highly value the 1996 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice that stated, "the threat or use of nuclear weapons would generally be contrary to the rules of international law". However, it is nothing but the “use of nuclear weapons in an extreme circumstance … in which the very survival of a state would be at stake”, on which the ICJ could not make definitive conclusion on its illegality, that will inevitably lead to devastating nuclear exchange. We request that the NGO Millennium Forum take a position that will regard unconditionally the threat or use of nuclear weapons as violation of international law.

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