New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Extension Bill
Since the 1990s there has been significant movement towards strengthening New Zealand's 1987 Nuclear Free Zone legislation. In her first term in parliament, Jeanette Fitzsimons, leader of the New Zealand Greens, introduced a members bill to the House on 25 May 2000, the New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Extension Bill. This, she says, sets out to fill gaps in the 1987 legislation and seeks to prohibit the transit of nuclear armed or propelled warships and transport of nuclear waste though the 200 mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ). Fitzsimons argues that there have been two major developments since the 1987 legislation that justify updating the Act:
Firstly, the International Court of Justice, prompted especially by New Zealand, has declared the deployment of nuclear weapons to be illegal. This justifies taking an even stronger stance on where they may be carried. The numbers of those weapons, and the States holding them, have increased, despite the end of the cold war. Uncertainties around the intentions of nuclear states and the location and safety of weapons have made disarmament an even more urgent priority now than it was in the 1980s. Secondly, nuclear fuel reprocessing has gone global, with shipments of highly hazardous plutonium mixed-oxide fuel and high-level waste passing regularly between Japan and Europe, sometimes through the Tasman Sea.
If adopted, the Bill would mount a serious challenge to the continued deployment of nuclear weapons throughout the world's oceans. The New Zealand Nuclear Free Zone Extension bill lost its second reading on 29 May 2002. Opposition to amending New Zealand's anti-nuclear legislation came from the New Zealand Labour Party, who say that implementing the detail would be impossible and could make the proposed new legislation unenforceable. They said the bill breaches a fundamental principle of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which requires all countries to allow freedom of navigation through their EEZs. However, anti-nuclear activists remain confident that the amendments to New Zealand's nuclear legislation will eventually pass, citing grey areas of the law in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. There is a firm belief amongst New Zealanders, as indicated by polls, that New Zealand must take leadership on this vital International issue.
Read more about this topic: New Zealand's Nuclear-free Zone
Famous quotes containing the words zealand, nuclear, free, zone, extension and/or bill:
“Teasing is universal. Anthropologists have found the same fundamental patterns of teasing among New Zealand aborigine children and inner-city kids on the playgrounds of Philadelphia.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)
“The atmosphere parents wish to create when talking with children about birth and reproduction is warm, honest, and reassuring, one that tells children they are free to ask questions as often as they need to, and you will answer them as lovingly as you know how.”
—Joanna Cole (20th century)
“Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.”
—Louis Aragon (1897–1982)
“Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence.”
—Socrates (469–399 B.C.)
“Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in nineteenth-century France and England, or twentieth-century Russia and America.”
—Lillian Hellman (1907–1984)