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Leaving the Landmine Ban Treaty Puts Civilians at Risk

A banner hanging on the Broken Chair sculpture outside the United Nations in Geneva calls on Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland to stay in the Mine Ban Treaty and not withdraw from it, June 11, 2025. © 2025 International Campaign to Ban Landmines

This week, Finland looks set to vote a final time on withdrawing from the international agreement banning antipersonnel mines, and Poland may soon follow. Mary Wareham and Laura Lodenius write that this is a catastrophic step backwards for the protection of civilians, and these states should reconsider. Withdrawing from long-standing legal and humanitarian norms, such as the Mine Ban Treaty, threatens to erode fundamental tenets of international humanitarian and human rights law and will only increase the likelihood of harming civilians without improving a countries’ protection.

On 1 April 2025, Prime Minister Petteri Orpo announced Finland’s intent to withdraw as one of the 165 countries supporting the Mine Ban Treaty, also known as the Ottawa Convention. This week, members of parliament look set to vote a final time to adopt draft legislation approving the withdrawal.

Poland’s parliament is also considering a bill to withdraw from the treaty after Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced measures aimed at bolstering his country’s defence, warning, “We are facing a very serious race, and it is a race for security.”

Finland and Poland both have first-hand experience of the long-term danger caused by antipersonnel landmines, yet they are poised to walk back decades of progress eradicating these indiscriminate weapons. Re-embracing antipersonnel landmines after rejecting them on humanitarian grounds is a catastrophic step backwards for the protection of civilians. The treaty withdrawals threaten to erode fundamental tenets of international humanitarian and human rights law.

Antipersonnel mines are explosive weapons that cannot distinguish between soldiers and civilians. As a recent Human Rights Council resolution finds, they violate fundamental human rights, causing displacement, disrupting aid delivery, and preventing agricultural activities.

Civilians made up 85 percent of all recorded landmine casualties in 2023, and children accounted for 37 percent of casualties when the age was recorded.

The Mine Ban Treaty withdrawals appear to be more about making clear that governments will take every action and use every opportunity to defend their country against possible aggression than about adding a new defence option. And the only option it adds is one that potentially causes more harm to their own citizens than to potential enemies.

Changing Security Landscape

The Mine Ban Treaty withdrawals follow Lithuania’s unprecedented denunciation of the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions, which took effect in March 2025. Since then, the parliaments of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania have all approved leaving the Mine Ban Treaty. The Baltic countries appear poised to deposit their formal notifications of denunciation of the treaty as a group at the United Nations in the coming weeks.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has caused immense suffering for Ukrainian civilians, particularly by committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. Russian forces have used more than a dozen types of antipersonnel mines, causing thousands of civilian casualties and contaminating vast tracts of agricultural land.

Ukraine, a party to the treaty, also used antipersonnel mines in 2022 and has received them from the United States in 2024, in violation of the treaty.

Blemishing an Excellent Record

Finnish and Polish civilians were harmed by landmines and unexploded ordnance during World War II and other conflicts. More than 80 years later, local authorities still receive requests to clear residual contamination from landmines and explosive remnants of war.

Given this experience, both countries participated in negotiating the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. Finland did not accede to the treaty until 2012, after undertaking an extensive internal process to ensure that it could fully comply with all the treaty’s obligations. Poland also delayed its ratification until 2012, until it was certain it could comply with the treaty’s provisions.

Above all, both countries wanted to ensure that their armed forces could be confident that they could identify viable alternative means and methods of warfare without having to resort to antipersonnel mines.

In August 2015, Finland completed the destruction of its stockpile of one million mines, while Poland completed the destruction of a stockpile of more than one million antipersonnel mines in April 2016.

There has been limited public discussion in Finland, Poland, and the Baltic countries about how and where their armed forces might use antipersonnel mines after leaving the Mine Ban Treaty. And no discussion on the measures that would be necessary to mark, fence, and keep civilians away from mined areas.

The deterrent factor of re-embracing antipersonnel mines isn’t worth the civilian risk, humanitarian liabilities and reputational damage, all of which extend far beyond their borders. The humanitarian impact will far outweigh any marginal military advantages.

Potential Production

The defence ministers of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Poland recommended their countries withdraw from the Mine Ban Treaty because “in the current security environment it is paramount to provide our defence forces flexibility and freedom of choice to potentially use new weapons systems and solutions to bolster the defence of the [NATO] Alliance’s vulnerable Eastern Flank.”

Antipersonnel mines cannot plausibly be justified as “new” since they have existed for decades.

The antipersonnel mines used in Ukraine since 2022 have been emplaced by hand, delivered by rockets, artillery and—as Human Rights Watch has documented—dropped by quadcopter drones. The delivery system might differ, but the antipersonnel mines that are detonated by the presence, proximity, or contact of a person still fall under the strict prohibitions of the treaty.

The ageing antipersonnel mines that the US supplied to Ukraine were nearly obsolete, but heralded as “non-persistent” due to their self-destruct features that set the mine to detonate after a period of hours or days. But such mines still pose unacceptable risks for civilians who face the danger of detonating mines that have failed to self-destruct and the danger of those mines randomly self-destructing at unpredictable times. They are ill-suited to border defence, and the clearance task is just as dangerous, costly, and time-consuming.

Claims that self-destructing antipersonnel mines represent advanced technology are entirely false. The last time the US and European countries produced any type of antipersonnel mines was in the 1990s. Due in large part to the Mine Ban Treaty, the production of antipersonnel mines has dwindled from dozens of countries to a dozen, notably China, India, Iran, Myanmar, and Russia.

Poland stopped producing antipersonnel mines in the mid-1980s but is now looking to restart. Poland’s Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defence, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz, told the Parliament on 20 May that “we want to have the possibility of production, we want to have the possibility of stockpiling” antipersonnel mines.

The Finnish defence technology company Insta has publicly expressed interest in producing antipersonnel mines if Finland completes its withdrawal from the treaty. In a June 3 letter to Human Rights Watch, the chief executive officer of Insta Group, Tapio Kolunsarka, said that “no decisions on this matter have been made” on production yet.

Kolunsarka described Insta as a “long-term strategic partner” of the Finnish Defence Forces and said that “we continue the development of new technologies and innovations like Insta Steel product family that can replace the currently known traditional victim-activated antipersonnel landmines.”

Insta has developed a command-detonated munition as an alternative to antipersonnel mines that can be delivered by various means, including being dropped by a quadcopter drone, also known as an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Kolunsarka told Human Rights Watch that the company’s “Insta Steel Eagle (UAV), and Insta Steel Lynx (ground mounted)” deliver the “Insta Steel Burst, which is the charge” that is “strictly detonated by an operator by pushing detonation button.”

According to Kolunsarka, “the detonation mode of these munitions cannot be changed to victim-activated. Therefore, they are in compliance with existing law in Finland and international humanitarian law, including the Mine Ban Treaty.”

After spending millions of euros on viable alternatives such as these command-detonated munitions, it’s hard to understand why Finland and Poland need to resort to producing antipersonnel mines.

Next Steps

Given the numerous and serious concerns and the apparent lack of a clear purpose, Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states should reconsider their rushed processes to withdraw from the treaty. They should allow more time for public debate, expert consultations and thorough review of the consequences before taking this drastic step.

By denouncing the Mine Ban Treaty, these states will no longer have a say in the central organising framework for achieving a landmine-free world. They will deliberately shut themselves out of this valuable forum and join the ranks of outliers such as Myanmar, North Korea, and Russia.

Withdrawals from multilateral disarmament treaties have been extremely rare until now, which makes these denunciations grave and concerning. A key goal for multilateral treaties is their full universalisation by setting the expectation that every country comes on board. This objective is now set to become weakened, impacting norm-setting overall.

For now, the Mine Ban Treaty withdrawals are confined to five European countries. But they are pushing the world to the precipice of a potentially slippery slope, where key legal and humanitarian norms might no longer be observed.

Governments should express more than regret at these treaty withdrawals, especially if their country is party to the Mine Ban Treaty. They must use their voice at every opportunity to uplift and defend the treaty’s norms by condemning new use, production, and transfers of antipersonnel mines. At this critical time, the world needs to hear their commitment to ending the suffering and casualties caused by antipersonnel mines.

The laws of war provide essential guardrails to protect civilians in armed conflict. Withdrawing from long-standing legal and humanitarian norms, such as the Mine Ban Treaty, will only increase the likelihood of harming civilians without improving countries’ protection.

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