×

News

Mayors for Peace seeks to step up campaign in pursuit of nuclear abolition

by Yumi Kanazaki, Staff Writer, dispatched from New York

On May 4, Mayors for Peace, for which Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba serves as president, convened a meeting at U.N. Headquarters, where the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference is currently being held. At the meeting, Mayors for Peace, with 3,880 member cities from 143 nations and regions, agreed to step up its campaign in pursuit of the elimination of nuclear weapons by 2020.

About 20 mayors, including the mayors of Ieper, Belgium and Yaizu, Shizuoka Prefecture, as well as those of citizens' groups, attended the meeting. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who will visit Hiroshima this August, delivered a speech and appealed: "We should act in a time frame so that at least some hibakusha will live to see the end of all nuclear weapons."

In response, Mayor Akiba said that they shared many ideas in common, and he presented Mr. Ban with 1,000 golden paper cranes folded by participants in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Ceremony last year.

On the same day, Mayor Akiba and Nagasaki Mayor Tomihisa Taue met with Libran Cabactulan, president of the NPT Review Conference. The mayors submitted 1,577 signatures by heads of local governments in support of the Hiroshima-Nagasaki Protocol, as well as 1,024,820 signatures by citizens in support of the "Cities Are Not Targets" project, to Mr. Cabactulan.

(Originally published on May 6, 2010)

Archives