Summary: Non-signatory Venezuela adopted the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2008, but has not commented since then on its position on accession. Venezuela participated in a meeting of the convention in 2011 and voted in favor of a key UN General Assembly (UNGA) resolution on the convention in 2016. Venezuela is not known to have used, produced, or exported cluster munitions, but it imported them and destroyed an unspecified quantity of cluster munition stocks in August 2011.

Policy

The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela has not yet acceded to the Convention on Cluster Munitions.

Venezuela generally does not address the question of whether the country will accede to the convention and last made a public statement on the convention in May 2008 (see below).

In its last public comment on cluster munitions, in November 2011 at the Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), Venezuela expressed support for “all efforts to address the humanitarian issue of the use of cluster munitions against civilian populations” and said, “a binding tool leading us to a prohibition of the use, stockpiling, [and] transfer…would be the ideal” but “we are far from achieving it.”[1] Venezuela has not proposed any further work on cluster munitions since the CCW failed in November 2011 to conclude a new protocol on the weapons, leaving the Convention on Cluster Munitions as the sole international instrument to specifically address these weapons.

On 5 December 2016, Venezuela voted in favor of a UNGA resolution on the Convention on Cluster Munitions that calls on states outside of the convention to “join as soon as possible.”[2]

Venezuela participated in several meetings of the Oslo Process that created the Convention on Cluster Munitions. It joined in the consensus adoption of the convention text in Dublin on 30 May 2008, but expressed opposition to the convention’s Article 21 provisions on “interoperability” (relations with states not party), which it said “[undermines] the spirit and purpose” of the convention.[3]

Venezuela has participated in just one meeting of the Convention on Cluster Munitions: the Second Meeting of States Parties in Beirut, Lebanon, in September 2011, which it attended as an observer. Venezuela was invited to, but did not attend the convention’s Sixth Meeting of States Parties in Geneva in September 2016.

Venezuelan media have reported on civilian harm in Syria from the use of cluster munitions.[4] However during 2016, Venezuela voted no to various UNGA and Human Rights Council (HRC) resolutions on Syria that condemned or expressed outrage at the use of cluster munitions.[5]

CMC member Amnesty International highlighted Venezuela’s lack of support for the ban on cluster munitions when Cuba acceded to the Convention on Cluster Munitions in 2016.[6]

Venezuela is a State Party to the Mine Ban Treaty. It is also party to the CCW.

Use, production, transfer, and stockpiling

Venezuela is not known to have used, produced, or exported cluster munitions.

Venezuela was not known to have imported or stockpiled cluster munitions until an August 2011 statement by the Ministry of the Popular Power for the Defense of Venezuela announcing the destruction of an unspecified number of cluster munitions belonging to the air force.[7] A Ministry of Defense spokesperson said the ordnance destroyed included Israeli-made AS TAL-1 cluster bombs acquired for use with F-16A aircraft. According to the statement, the stockpile destruction was undertaken at Fort Caribbean in El Pao, Cojedes, as part an operation to destroy surplus ammunition and ordnance.

It is not clear if Venezuela has more stocks of TAL-1 cluster bombs or other cluster munitions. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has reported that Israel exported the LAR-160 surface-to-surface rocket system to Venezuela, but it is not known if ammunition containing submunitions was included in the deal.[8]