Kuwait

The State of Kuwait has not signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions. It is also not party to the Convention on Conventional Weapons.

Kuwait did not attend the first two international meetings of the Oslo Process in Oslo in February 2007 and Lima in May 2007, but participated in the Belgrade conference for affected states in October 2007, and the international conferences to develop the convention text in Vienna in December 2007 and Wellington in February 2008. It endorsed the Wellington Declaration, indicating its intention to participate fully in the formal negotiations in Dublin.

However, Kuwait subsequently chose to attend the Dublin negotiations in May 2008 only as an observer, and thus did not adopt the convention. It did not attend the Signing Conference in Oslo in December. Kuwait rarely spoke during the Oslo Process, and has not yet made a clear statement regarding its cluster munition policy.

Kuwait is not believed to have used or produced cluster munitions, but it has stockpiles. In 1995, Kuwait was the first export customer for the Russian produced 300mm Smerch multiple launch rocket system fitted with dual purpose and sensor-fuzed submunitions, buying 27 launch units.^[1]

Kuwait is affected by cluster munitions which were used extensively during the 1991 Gulf War by the United States, France, and the United Kingdom.