NEW DELHI, 16 June 2007 — The Cabinet yesterday approved India’s accession to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material (CPPNM), as also an amendment to the Indian Extradition Act making unauthorized trade in nuclear material an international offense.
India is to sign and ratify a UN convention on protecting nuclear material that Washington had insisted on as part of the Indo-US nuclear deal.
”India’s signing of the convention would strengthen the international legal framework to combat terrorism,” Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunhsi told reporters yesterday after a Cabinet meeting presided over by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.
It would “also enhance international cooperation in investigation, prosecution and extradition of those who commit terrorist acts and acts of sabotage involving radioactive material or nuclear devices and facilities”, the minister added.
The CPPNM is a convention of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). It aims to prohibit signatory countries from conducting sale, purchase or movement through their territory of any nuclear material from any unauthorized party or nonsignatory country.
The signatories to the convention, at a conference at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) headquarters in July 2005, adopted an amendment “with a view to strengthening the provisions of the convention, in particular, for including terrorist acts and acts of sabotage against nuclear materials/nuclear facilities among the offenses that state parties are required to make punishable, under their domestic laws.”
Meanwhile, in what is viewed as a major relief for those fearing legally approved demolition of their residential and/or commercial premises in the capital, the Cabinet yesterday approved promulgation of an ordinance to “grant temporary relief from forcible action against unauthorized development in the form of encroachment by slum and hutment dwellers, hawkers and urban street vendors and unauthorized development in the existing farm houses.”
