Costa Rica
Practice Relating to the Prohibition of Certain Types of Landmines
Costa Rica’s Law on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Mines (2002) provides:
It is prohibited to:
a) Employ or promote the use of mines.
b) Develop, produce, acquire, stockpile, retain, import, export, possess, transfer, trade or decant, directly or indirectly, mines, anti-handling devices, parts or raw material for manufacturing these.
c) Incite, assist, encourage or induce, in one way or another, anyone to participate, directly or indirectly in an activity prohibited to be carried out on national territory or outside it, as stipulated in the Convention on the Prohibition of the Use, Stockpiling, Production and Transfer or Anti-Personnel Mines and on their Destruction and domestic legislation on the subject.
Costa Rica, Law on the Prohibition of Anti-Personnel Mines, 2002, Article 3.
Costa Rica attended all the preparatory meetings for the adoption of a treaty banning anti-personnel landmines, endorsed the Final Declaration of the Brussels Conference on Anti-personnel Landmines in June 1997 and was a full participant in the Oslo negotiations in September 1997 which led to the adoption of a treaty banning anti-personnel landmines. It voted in favour of the UN General Assembly resolutions in support of a ban on anti-personnel landmines in 1996 and 1998.
Landmine Monitor Report 1999: Toward a Mine-Free World, available at http://www.the-monitor.org/index.php/publications/display?act=submit&pqs_year=1999&pqs_type=lm&pqs_report=costa_rica&pqs_section=.
On 28–29 November 1996 in San Jose, Costa Rica, the Foreign Ministers of Central America, including those of Costa Rica, Fernando Naranjo Villalobos, and of the CARICOM countries “reaffirmed their decision to make the necessary efforts, with the assistance of national, regional and international institutions, to make Central America and the Caribbean, a zone free of anti-personnel mines by the year 2000”. They also supported the “Ottawa Process”, including the immediate launch of negotiations and the signing in Canada in December 1997 of a legally binding international agreement to ban this type of weapon.
Landmine Monitor Report 1999: Toward a Mine-Free World, available at http://www.the-monitor.org/index.php/publications/display?act=submit&pqs_year=1999&pqs_type=lm&pqs_report=costa_rica&pqs_section=; Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Canada, “AP Mine Ban: Progress Report” http://www/dfait-maeci/gc.ca/english/foreignp/disarm/mines/report1f.htm, 22 February 1999.
At the 27th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent in 1999, Costa Rica stated that it would promote “the struggle to clear the land of all anti-personnel mines”.
Costa Rica, Statement at the 27th International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, Geneva, 31 October–6 November 1999.
