Disarmament

Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW)

The Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons Which May Be Deemed to Be Excessively Injurious or to Have Indiscriminate Effects, comprises the framework convention and five protocols, which ban or restrict the use of various types of weapons that are considered to cause excessive suffering to combatants or indiscriminate harm to civilian populations.

The weapons covered include weapons leaving undetectable fragments in the human body (Protocol I), mines, booby-traps and other devices (Protocol II), incendiary weapons (Protocol III), blinding laser weapons (Protocol IV) and explosive remnants of war (Protocol V).

The Convention embodying the fundamental principles of the law of armed conflict constitutes one of the principal instruments of international humanitarian law, complementing the Geneva Conventions of 1949 for the protection of war victims and their Additional Protocols of 1977.

The Convention was adopted in 1980 and entered into force in 1983 currently has a total of 125 States Parties and four Signatories.

Greece became party to the Convention in 1981, expressed its consent to be bound by Protocols I, II and III in 1992, by Protocol IV in 1997, by Amended Protocol II in 1999 and ratified the amendment to article 1 of the Convention in 2004 and Protocol V in 2014.