Summary: State Party Tunisia ratified the convention on 28 September 2010 and has participated in several meetings of the convention, most recently in 2014. Tunisia has informed the Monitor that it has never used, produced, transferred, or stockpiled cluster munitions. It has not submitted the initial transparency report for the convention originally due in 2011.

Policy

The Republic of Tunisia signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions on 12 January 2009, ratified on 28 September 2010, and the convention entered into force for the country on 1 March 2011.

Tunisia informed the Monitor in April 2011 that it adheres to the convention under the terms of its ratification law enacted in February 2010.

As of 19 June 2017, Tunisia still had not submitted its initial Article 7 transparency report for the Convention on Cluster Munitions, originally due by 28 August 2011.

Tunisia participated in one regional meeting of the Oslo Process that created the Convention on Cluster Munitions (Livingstone, Zambia, in March 2008). It was the first country to sign the convention at the UN in New York after the convention was opened for signature at the Oslo Signing Conference in December 2008.[1]

Tunisia has participated in two of the convention’s Meetings of States Parties, most recently in 2012. It was invited to, but did not attend the Sixth Meeting of States Parties in Geneva in September 2016. Tunisia participated in the convention’s intersessional meetings in Geneva in 2012 and 2014, but did not make any statements.

Tunisia voted in favor of a UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution on the Convention on Cluster Munitions in December 2016 that urged states outside the convention to “join as soon as possible.”[2] Tunisia has voted in favor of UNGA resolutions that express outrage at the use of cluster munitions in Syria, most recently in December 2016.[3]

Tunisia is a State Party to the Mine Ban Treaty. It is also party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons.

Use, production, transfer, and stockpiling

Tunisia has informed the Monitor that it has never used, produced, transferred, or stockpiled cluster munitions.[4] It must provide the UN with an initial transparency report for the convention to formally confirm this statement.

Tunisia is reported to possess the Hydra-70 air-to-surface unguided rocket system, but it is not known if the ammunition types available to it include the M261 Multi-Purpose Submunition rocket.[5]