A halt to any contribution to companies responsible for the deaths of innocents. Italy enacts a stringent law on cluster bombs and anti-personnel mines.
For our country, 3 October was an important day. The day on which a law was finally passed enshrining a clear and unequivocal principle: no one will be able to fund, directly or indirectly, the companies that produce or sell cluster bombs and anti-personnel mines. A stringent law that places us at the forefront in Europe, and applies to any financial institution: banks, foundations, pension funds.
Italy has already banned the production and use of cluster bombs and anti-personnel mines. But the distinctive feature of this law, Giuseppe Schiavello explains to Vita.it (director of the Campagna Italiana contro le Mine), is that it acts on financial mechanisms that are usually left to self-regulation. Addressing them in a very detailed and technical way, so as to leave no room for stratagems to circumvent it. In this respect, therefore, the approach is similar to the one adopted for capital used to fund terrorism.
In concrete terms, the law bans any investment in companies that are in any way involved in the market for anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions and their components. Not only manufacturers, therefore, but also those who develop, assemble, import and export, use, carry out research and development, and so on. If supervisory bodies discover any violations, financial intermediaries will be punished with a fine ranging from 150,000 euros to one and a half million, with heavy penalties also for their executives.
The bill bearing the title "Measures to counter the financing of companies that produce anti-personnel mines, cluster munitions and submunitions" was passed by the plenary session of the Chamber of Deputies with 389 votes in favour out of 393 members present, three abstentions and zero against. This outcome was reached after a process lasting no fewer than seven years, in which civil society also mobilised. As Vita.it recalls, the NOMONEY4BOMBS petition launched by the Campagna Italiana contro le Mine gathered no fewer than 10,000 signatures. 10,000 people who raised their voices to send a message to banks and pension funds: you cannot think only of profits, turning a blind eye to people and their fundamental rights. First and foremost, the right to life.
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If such a stringent law is needed, it is because companies that produce cluster munitions continue undisturbed to receive billions in funding, from one end of the planet to the other. The figures cited in the 2017 edition of the report "Worldwide investments in cluster munitions: a shared responsibility", published by the organisation PAX, are unequivocal. Over the past four years, 166 financial institutions from 14 different countries have funded, in various capacities, six companies that produce cluster munitions: Chinese firms Norinco and China Aerospace Science and Industry, South Korean firms Hanwha and Poongsan, and American firms Orbital ATK and Textron. We are talking about capital reaching the combined total of 31 billion dollars.
The category of cluster bombs includes anti-personnel mines, anti-tank mines and other armour-piercing, fragmentation and incendiary devices. In 2010, the United Nations convention banning them officially came into force, signed by 119 states (but not by the United States, Russia, China, India, Israel, Pakistan and Brazil).
But this, so far, has not been enough. And cluster bombs continue to kill. According to the Cluster Munition Monitor 2017, in 2016 971 people were injured or killed, almost double the figure for the previous year. Almost all of the victims (860) are in Syria, 51 in Laos and 38 in Yemen. A further 114 people, in ten different countries, fell victim to the detonation of old unexploded ordnance. Even more chilling is the finding that 98% of the 2016 victims were civilians.
Since the 1960s, when the United States began attacking Laos and South-East Asia with cluster bombs, more than 21,200 victims have been documented worldwide. But this is an extremely partial count. Some estimates suggest that, if people who have not been identified were also included, the figure would reach at least 56,000.
