Mine Ban Convention - What is it?

Under the Anti-Personnel Mine Ban Convention, also known as the Ottawa Treaty, landmines that target people are banned. The Mine Ban Convention is widely acknowledged as one of the most successful treaties in history for its role in drastically reducing the use of landmines worldwide.  

The Mine Ban Convention has reduced casualties from landmines, from 25,000 casualties per year before its adoption to less than 1,000 in 2012, a reduction in casualty rates of 95% in less than 15 years.

For decades, military and humanitarian experts alike, have agreed, with evidence, that landmines are so dangerous for civilians that the only good choice is to never use them, preventing any form of presence of these weapons during and after active hostilities. The safest and most effective means to do that has always been a convention that ban anti-personnel landmines, prohibits their production, and requires states to cooperate in clearing and destroying those weapons. 

When the Ottawa Convention was adopted in 1997, it was not only the first disarmament treaty primarily concerned with protecting people’s life and dignity, reducing fear and its consequences, known as “human security”; but it was also the first disarmament treaty that included the civil society since its own drafting. 

In fact, the Convention resulted from a cooperation between civil society organisations active in 1990s and organised under the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, including landmine survivors' organisations and organisations such as MAG, and like-minded states, known as the Ottawa Process.

Human security and civil society activism have inevitably gone hand in hand. One of the important tasks of civil society organisations has always been to keep the focus on how anti-personnel landmines indiscriminately kill, maim, and change lives forever, targeting mostly civilians. 

According to the Landmine Monitor, in 2023, 84% of the recorded casualties were civilians. 

Hamed Osman is the head of nursing at Idlib Surgical Specialised Hospital in Syria. He says urgent work is needed to make people aware of the risks and dangers because people feel like they have no choice but to return to their land and to farm to earn money. 

All types of landmines are considered extremely dangerous because they cannot be controlled in who they target; they indiscriminate. Furthermore, landmines cannot even be stopped if they are triggered by the movement or the presence of a civilian. 

Before the Mine Ban Convention, it was estimated that 2.5 million landmines used to be emplaced every year, with only 80,000 of them cleared every year. The Mine Ban Convention created a system and procedures to eliminate large scale emplacing of landmines and to increase the rate of clearance and the international support for it. 

Heightened international tension and security fears in Europe since the Russian invasion of Ukraine have already prompted Lithuania to withdraw from the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which bans the use of cluster munitions - an indiscriminate weapon that causes a huge number of civilian casualties. 

Now, Lithuania and other countries bordering Russia have signalled they are intending to withdraw from the Mine Ban Convention too. You can find our full statement on countries withdrawing from the Mine Ban Convention here.

There are no easy choices when a state feels under threat of armed aggression, but International Humanitarian Law (IHL), including the Mine Ban Convention, is designed precisely for times like these.