The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) entered into force on 22 January 2021  three years after being negotiated at the UN General Assembly and 90 days after the 50th country joined the Treaty on 24 October 2020.

UNA-UK welcomes this important multilateral Treaty which completes the project to ban all three categories of weapons of mass destruction after biological weapons were banned in 1975, and chemical weapons in 1997.

While the UK does not currently support this Treaty, pressure is mounting on the Government to engage constructively with it, and ultimately, to join it.  Today, we are calling on UNA-UK supporters to assist this project.  

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) is running a Cities Appeal, asking cities and local authorities across the world to endorse the Treaty. So far cities and local authorities across the UK including Manchester, Edinburgh, Oxford, Brighton and Hove, Norwich and Leeds, have signed up to support the Treaty’s implementation. With your help we would like to dramatically increase the list.

Please ask your city or local authority to join the growing list!

Here you can access an adaptable template letter, which you can send to your city or local authority imploring them to endorse the Treaty and take a stand for nuclear disarmament. A full list of all cities and local authorities signed up so far can be viewed here, and you can access further resources and information on how the Appeal is impacting policy makers  here.

The complete elimination of nuclear weapons remains the highest disarmament priority of the United Nations. UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, recognised the instrumental role of civil society in facilitating the negotiation and ratification of the TPNW and called on all states to work together to realise the ambition of a world free from nuclear weapons.

UNA-UK is a proud partner organisation of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons – the 2017 Nobel Prize laureate. Please join us in this campaign by urging your local authorities to take action.

Just as civil society was instrumental in advancing the entry into force of this treaty, civil society can also be instrumental in building support for the treaty and taking action to push their national governments to join.
 
Many thanks,

The UNA-UK Team

More resources on the TPNW can be found here

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