News

by Junpei Fujimura, Staff Writer

On April 2 the City of Hiroshima will set up areas in the first-floor lobbies of city hall and the city’s eight ward offices to collect signatures on petitions in support of a treaty banning nuclear weapons. The signatures will be given to representatives of the United Nations in May by Mayor Kazumi Matsui at the venue for the first meeting of the preparatory committee for the review conference of the parties to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty in Vienna, Austria.

A treaty banning nuclear weapons would mean a complete ban on their manufacture, possession or use. Mayors for Peace, of which Mayor Matsui serves as president, has initiated a process for the elimination of nuclear weapons by the year 2020. This process calls for a treaty to go into effect in 2015. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has also stressed the need for such a treaty.

In December 2010 Mayors for Peace launched a petition drive, and areas where people could sign the petition were set up at Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and other locations. With the cooperation of consumers’ cooperative unions throughout Japan and other organizations, about 380,000 signatures have been collected so far. At the November 2011 meeting of the executive board of Mayors for Peace in Spain it was decided to launch petition drives in all of the organization’s member cities. As a result, the City of Hiroshima set up its own areas to collect signatures.

Mayor Matsui will take the signatures that have been collected through late April to Vienna. Signatures collected after that will continue to be submitted to the United Nations.

(Originally published on March 29, 2012)