UN Convention
An Open Appeal to the United Nations Secretariat and the Heads of All UN Member States
Today, a number of states have, to varying degrees, restricted access to information on military casualties through national regulations or legally established frameworks.
The list of states where access to data on military casualties and its public dissemination are restricted by laws on state secrets, provisions of martial law, or military censorship regimes includes Russia, China, Ukraine, Turkey, Israel, Iran, North Korea, and Syria. A number of other states, including the United States and the countries of the European Union, systematically distort military casualty statistics, often publishing biased data that make it impossible to draw conclusions about the price a state pays for a particular conflict.
Virtually every one of the aforementioned states has either already become embroiled in an armed conflict or is one step away from an armed confrontation.
Concealing casualties is one of the effective mechanisms that makes it possible to hide the true cost of political and military adventures and to continue indefinitely wars that are, first and foremost, not in the interests of the population.
By concealing the true cost of armed conflicts from their citizens, states create the illusion of bloodless wars and encourage impunity. The anonymization of human life is unacceptable. Our task is to ensure that silence about those who have died will never again be a legal instrument of warfare, and that people understand the price they are paying by failing to stand in the way of the plans and ambitions of others.
Today, we are launching a procedure under which a draft UN Convention on Ensuring the Transparency of Information on Personnel Casualties During Armed Conflicts will be submitted both to the United Nations Secretariat and to the heads of all UN Member States. We ask that it be considered without delay and demand that the issue of its ratification be brought forward for consideration.
Our task is to ensure that armed conflicts become the exception rather than the rule, as is the case today, and that politicians see only one path toward resolving emerging contradictions - the path of diplomatic negotiations. And we will do everything in our power to make such a reality an everyday norm, whether the world's politicians want it or not. Because we, the people, are the sole source of power within the territory of every state without exception. And we want to live in peace.
Stefan Ilic
