Participation
Meeting States Parties, a conversation with the President of 1 MSP
Speaker
Alexander Kmentt
Alexander Kmentt is the Director of the Disarmament, Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Department of the Austrian Foreign Ministry and President of the June 2022 First Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
From 2016-19, Alexander Kmentt served as Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the Political and Security Committee of the EU. He has worked extensively on disarmament issues, including at the Conference on Disarmament and in the CTBTO in Vienna. He is one of the architects of the initiative on the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). He was responsible for the 2014 Vienna Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons for which he conceived the Humanitarian Pledge. This Pledge garnered the support of 135 States and paved the way for the 2017 TPNWs.
During a sabbatical in 2019-20 as Senior Research Fellow at King’s College London, he wrote the book The Treaty Prohibiting Nuclear Weapons: How it was achieved and why it matters (Routledge 2020). He was elected “Arms Control Person of the Year 2014” by the US-based Arms Control Association. Alexander Kmentt holds an Austrian Law Degree and an MPhil in International Relations from Cambridge University (UK).