George Perkovich, Vice President of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a member of the group of experts who authored the ‘Universal Compliance-Draft Report’ initiated a discussion on the Report at the Institute.

He began by focusing on the title of the report, which he said was arrived at after careful deliberation. The two words that make up the title; ‘Universal’ and ‘Compliance’ were selected carefully. Going into the significance of each, he said that, Universal is important as it takes into account the fact that existing nonproliferation regimes are not universal and leave out critical players such as India, Pakistan and Israel. It also allows states like North Korea to walk out if they choose to do so. In the post September 11 scenario, non-state actors have emerged as important players and their potential to do damage to the regime has to be taken into account. The present regime does not take into account non state actors and is thus not universal.

The second word in the in the title ‘Compliance’ is also important as in the NPT the focus was on universal membership, not on compliance. Thus, it is important that emphasis be laid on the compliance component. An important statement made by Perkovich was that the US has to realize that it was part of the problem and thus should be a pro-active player in both the universal and compliance elements.

Perkovich went on to list five obligations that form the core of Universal Compliance. As mentioned in the report, “each of these general objectives requires subsidiary national and international policies, resources, and institutional reforms. Some of the necessary steps require new international and national laws and voluntary codes of conduct, while others require only the will to live up to existing commitments.â€