# Ottawa Mine Ban Convention The 1997 Convention on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Mines bans the use, stockpiling, production and transfer of anti-personnel landmines and requires clearance of mined areas. It was produced by the **Ottawa Process** — a negotiation deliberately routed around the consensus-bound Conference on Disarmament, driven by a coalition of middle-power governments and NGOs, and completed in about fourteen months. It won the International Campaign to Ban Landmines the 1997 [[Nobel Peace Prize]]. It is the founding instance of **humanitarian disarmament**: weapons banned because of what they do to civilians rather than because of a strategic bargain between great powers. **The United States has never signed and is not a party.** ## The 2025–2026 Unravelling For twenty-eight years no state had ever left. Then five did at once. | State | Instrument deposited | Withdrawal effective | |---|---|---| | [[Estonia]] | 27 June 2025 | 27 December 2025 | | [[Latvia]] | June–Aug 2025 | 27 December 2025 | | [[Lithuania]] | June–Aug 2025 | 27 December 2025 | | Finland | July 2025 | 10 January 2026 | | Poland | 20 August 2025 | 20 February 2026 | All five border Russia or [[Belarus]], and all cited the same rationale: deterrence of a Russian ground offensive along a long, thinly-held frontier. **Current parties: 162** per an OHCHR press release of 16 June 2026. > [!note] Arithmetic doesn't quite close > The Arms Control Association put the figure at 166 before the withdrawals, which would give 161. Use 162 as the most recent authoritative number and carry a ±1 uncertainty. **Poland has announced plans to procure roughly 15 million anti-personnel mines. Finland has announced intent to acquire and domestically manufacture them.** Those are not hedges; they are production decisions. Two states moved the other way: **Lebanon announced intent to join**, and **Micronesia** submitted ratification documents. **Norway explicitly declined to exit**, despite bordering Russia — the single most useful data point for anyone assessing whether the security rationale compels the outcome. ## Ukraine: Suspended, Not Withdrawn Ukraine's position is legally distinct and frequently misreported. Zelenskyy signed a decree initiating withdrawal on 29 June 2025; on **15 July 2025 the Verkhovna Rada voted 305–40 to *suspend* participation**, and he signed that law the same day. **The ICBL-CMC position is that Ukraine "remains fully bound" and that the claimed suspension "carries no legal effect"** — the Convention contains a withdrawal procedure but no suspension mechanism, and other states parties have affirmed that it does not allow suspension of its operation. Human Rights Watch challenged the suspension in September 2025. So: five completed withdrawals, plus one contested suspension of doubtful legal validity. ## The American Reversal The US never joined, but its policy has oscillated. The Biden administration's 2022 policy restricted American anti-personnel landmine use to the Korean Peninsula. **On 2 December 2025 [[Pete Hegseth]] signed a directive rescinding it** — removing the geographic restriction and granting combatant commanders authority to employ "non-persistent" anti-personnel landmines globally. It was first reported on 19 December 2025. ## The Casualty Numbers Landmine Monitor recorded **6,279 casualties in 2024**, the highest since 2020. The OHCHR figures for the same year: 1,945 killed, 4,325 injured, **roughly 90% civilians**, across 58 contaminated states and territories. Mine-action funding fell from $125 million to $46 million over the seven years to 2025 — a decline that predates and is separate from the withdrawals, and that will govern how long the clearance backlog takes regardless of what any state signs. ## Why It Matters Here The Ottawa Convention is the clearest case in this vault of a norm reversing, and it deserves to be read carefully rather than as simple decay. The withdrawing states have a real argument. They face a plausible ground invasion across terrain they cannot densely garrison, and mines are the cheapest way to slow an armoured advance. Norway, facing a version of the same threat and declining to leave, shows the argument is not compelling — but it is not frivolous either. What makes this a vault story rather than a defence-policy story is the direction of travel and who is moving. Humanitarian disarmament worked by making a weapon **disreputable** — the treaty's power was never enforcement, it was that using landmines marked a state as a certain kind of actor. Five European democracies withdrawing, two of them announcing domestic production, does not breach an enforcement mechanism. It removes the stigma, which was the mechanism. The same logic runs through the [[Convention on Cluster Munitions]], and it sits alongside the [[Universal Declaration of Human Rights]] page's account of the "natural rights" reframing: in both cases the instrument survives and the normative pressure that made it operate does not. ## See Also - [[Convention on Cluster Munitions]] — the sibling humanitarian-disarmament treaty, also breached in 2025 - [[Chemical Weapons Convention]] — humanitarian prohibition that has held - [[Russo-Ukrainian War]] — the conflict driving every withdrawal - [[NATO]] — the alliance all five withdrawing states belong to - [[Coalition of the Willing]] — the European security architecture around the same threat - [[International Law Hub]]