UNITED NATIONS, September 21 (Itar-Tass) — Provisions of international law permitting only a handful of selected nations to possess nuclear arms should be revised, President Nursultan Nazarbayev of Kazakhstan said Wednesday as he took the floor at the 66th session of the UN General Assembly.
"A paradoxical situation has taken shape in the world today," he said. "It allows some countries to possess and improve nuclear weapons, while other nations are denied the right even to develop them."
"This situation is unfair, unproporationate and dishonest," Nazarbayev said."These provisions of international law should be revised."
He hailed the U.S.-Russian agreement on a gradual reduction of nuclear arsenals.
"I think it's important that other nations making up the nuclear club should also join the process," Nazarbayev said. "We propose to start drafting a universal declaration of a nuclear-free world."
"Kazakhstan pins big hopes on the summit conference on nuclear security due in Seoul in 2012," he said. "At the current stage, nuclear weapons are catalysts of the arms race, not the factors deterring it."
Nazarbayev recalled that the Republic of Kazakhstan marks the 20th anniversary since independence since year and it has observed the letter and spirit of the UN Charter meticulously throughout all these years.
"We shut down the world's largest nuclear testing ground in Semipalatinsk and we became one of the world's first nuclear-free new states," he said. "That's a great contribution on the part of my country to the ensuring of global peace and stability."
Nazarbayev called for enhancing security in the Internet, for fighting with terrorism, including the one in the field of information exchange, and for curbing Islamophobia.