The Ministerial Meeting of the Non-Proliferation and Disarmament Initiative (NPDI) whose members include Australia, Canada, Chile, Germany, Holland, Japan, Mexico, Poland, the UAE and Turkey was held in İstanbul on 16 June 2012.
In his opening remarks Minister of Foreign Affairs of Turkey Mr. Ahmet Davutoğlu said that member states gathered fully conscious of their collective responsibility to work towards achieving the goal of a safer world without nuclear weapons. He stressed that proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction constitutes one of the leading challenges for the humanity and real advancement in securing our world from the threat of nuclear weapons can only be achieved through continuous and irreversible progress in nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. In this vein, he also noted that the overall disarmament process is facing important problems. Also, to be able to disperse the gloom and pave the way for greater achievements in the future, Turkey believes that the international community needs to attain meaningful progress in the short term, he added.
In the İstanbul Statement of the Foreign Ministers which was issued at the conclusion of the meeting, member states called upon all nuclear-weapon States to intensify efforts to reduce and eventually eliminate all types of nuclear weapons, deployed and non-deployed, in a transparent, verifiable and irreversible manner. Moreover, member states expressed their committed to the objective of a nuclear weapons free world. They also underlined their resolved position to support efforts towards reducing nuclear proliferation risks by ensuring compliance with the international non-proliferation regime.
The NPDI, which has united around the goal of a world free of nuclear weapons and proved itself as an effective formation in the nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation area with its concrete cooperation proposals during the almost two-year-period since its establishment, will actively maintain its efforts in these fields in the forthcoming period as well.
