Nuclear legal lawsuit awarded

MAJURO – The foreign minister and the people of the Marshall Islands were honoured Thursday for taking legal action against the nuclear powers for failing to honour disarmament obligations.

Tony de Brum and the people of the Pacific island group shared the honorary portion of the 2015 Right Livelihood Award, sometimes referred to as the “alternative Nobel.”

Created in 1980, the annual Right Livelihood Award honours efforts that prize founder, Swedish-German philanthropist Jakob von Uexkull, felt were being ignored by the Nobel Prizes.

The awards will be presented in the Swedish Parliament on Novemer 30.

The award is in recognition of the Marshalls’ courage in challenging the nuclear powers’ failure to honour Non-Proliferation Treaty obligations.

The country’s lawsuit against the United States was dismissed by the federal court on constitutional grounds in February, but de Brum says the country is appealing the decision.

And de Brum has reiteratied his call for nuclear powers to honour their promise to disarm.

He told Radio New Zealand he was delighted with the award.

“I don’t think it has quite sunk in yet what a great honour this is for us. But I am very happy and anxious to share it with the people I represent.

“It’s something that I have always wanted to do, to bring up the issue of nuclear sanity in such a way that the big countries that possess these weapons begin to act responsibly in their nuclear policies.

“We all joined the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty as small island countries because the big countries were there and made a promise to disarm as part of the treaty.

“As a country that has seen and experienced some of the impacts of these deadly weapons we thought that it was incumbent upon us to do something, to point out the folly of having an agreement and not carry out what you promised you’d do.

De Brum said his nation’s legal action was dismissed not on substance – but on on a question of whether or not we had jurisdiction.

“It has nothing to do with the substance of the lawsuit.

“The argument was that we cannot prove direct harm if they do not carry out the mandate of the treaty. But we can. The direct harm is we’re threatened. The threat of nuclear weapons is most real, it’s not imagined.

“Because we’ve seen what it does. And not only that, but having these weapons in such large quantities, in such powerful amounts, is a threat to the world.

“Because not only can they be used deliberately to obliterate what we know of civilisation but they can also be accidentally set upon each other and destroy the world.

“That threat is just as real as actually seeing them being exploded in the distance.”