Human Rights Watch (HRW) has called for greater global efforts to ensure an international treaty banning cluster munitions achieves its goal of ending the usage of such weapons, which it says are being used "repeatedly" by Russia in its war against Ukraine.
HRW said in a report released on May 29 that the Convention On Cluster Munitions, adopted on May 30, 2008, in Dublin, "is being tested as never before.”
The report details how cluster munitions are being used in several conflict areas of the world, including by Russia, which HRW says has "repeatedly" used them since launching its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, causing hundreds of civilian casualties and damaging civilian objects, including homes, hospitals, and schools.
"A single Russian cluster munition attack on a train station in Kramatorsk on April 8, 2022, killed at least 58 civilians and wounded 100 others. The stigma created by the convention has led to widespread international condemnation of these attacks," the report says, noting Ukrainian forces have also used cluster munitions on several occasions.
Russia and Ukraine are not signatories of the treaty.
WATCH: Award-winning Ukrainian journalist Andriy Dubchak barely escaped with his life as he and his son came under cluster-bomb attack. The weapons are widely banned, but both Russia and Ukraine are accused of using them. The attack blew out his car's windows, ripped through the vehicle, and fragments even tore through his trousers.
HRW also said that the Syrian-Russian military alliance used cluster munition rockets in attacks on camps for internally displaced people in Syria's Idlib Province in November, killing and wounding civilians.
Cluster munitions are launched by artillery, rockets, missiles, and aircraft. The weapons open in midair and disperse dozens or hundreds of submunitions, also called bomblets, over a wide area.
Many submunitions fail to explode on initial impact, leaving duds that can indiscriminately wound and kill, like land mines, for years until they are cleared and destroyed.
The Convention On Cluster Munitions bans the use, production, acquisition, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions and requires the destruction of stockpiles.
HRW said there have been no reports of new use, production, or transfers of cluster munitions by the 123 nations that have signed or ratified the convention.
However, a handful of countries outside the treated have produced or used cluster munitions, the group said.
