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Oslo: Representatives from some 100 countries meet in Oslo Wednesday to sign a treaty banning the use of cluster bombs, but major producers such as China, Russia and the United States are shunning the pact.
The treaty, agreed upon in Dublin in May, outlaws the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of cluster munitions which primarily kill civilians, and obliges signatory nations to help countries and individuals who fall victim to the weapon.
"It's only one of the very few times in history that an entire category of weapons has been banned," said Thomas Nash of the Cluster Munitions Coalition (CMC) umbrella group that comprises some 300 non-governmental organisations.
Dropped from planes or fired from artillery, cluster bombs explode in mid-air to randomly scatter hundreds of bomblets, which can be three inches (eight centimetres) in size.
Many cluster bomblets fail to explode, often leaving poverty-stricken areas trying to recover from war littered with countless de-facto landmines, which were themselves banned by a treaty signed in Ottawa in 1997.
According to Handicap International, about 100,000 people have been maimed or killed by cluster bombs around the world since 1965, 98 percent of them civilians.
More than a quarter of the victims are children who mistake the bomblets for toys or tin cans.
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