MEDIA STATEMENT:

Governments urged to act on Children's Day - nuclear weapons are not child's play.

Tokyo: Today's national Japanese holiday, Children's Day, is a powerful reminder of the need for adults to work for a safer world.

Soka Gakkai International (SGI) and the International Campaign to
Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) are issuing a timely call to governments meeting at the United Nations in New York this week to turn the growing international momentum for nuclear weapons abolition into reality.

SGI Vice President Hiromasa Ikeda said, "When we make a nuclear weapons free world the goal for our children's future, we are all energized and empowered. Human beings are best able to advance when guided by hopeful objectives, rather than driven by fear."

This year Children's Day coincides with an important UN meeting in New York in which government delegations from around the world lay crucial groundwork for the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference. The NPT came into force in 1970 and is currently the only multilateral treaty on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation.
 
ICAN Board member Dimity Hawkins said, "Above all we want to ensure our children are healthy and happy: the existence of nuclear weapons and the threat of nuclear war is the opposite of healthy and happy."
 
"As adults - the ones our children trust and look to - it is our
responsibility to meet this challenge and rid the world of nuclear weapons. We have perhaps the best opportunity of our generation to do this. We must seize this important moment and act now," said Ms Hawkins.
 
"Children mirror the attitudes they see in adults. So long as the world's adults insist on possessing mass destruction weapons like nuclear weapons, how can we tell children not to choose violence in their lives? On Children's Day we urge the representatives of all the governments gathered at the UN to take decisive action to ensure all children can live in a world free from the threat of nuclear annihilation," concluded Mr. Ikeda.

Media contacts:

Kimiaki Kawai, SGI NGO Liaison at the UN: tel: +81 3 5360 9831, email: kawai@soka.jp, www.sgi.org
Teri Calder, ICAN Media Officer, tel: +61 425 230 679, email: teri@icanw.org