News
My Happy End
In 2010, our foundation has joined My Happy End. This is an association recently formed by ten charity organsisations of Switzerland, among them the Swiss sections of Amnesty International and Greenpeace. My Happy End aims to encourage legacy donations to the benefit of non-profit charity organisations.
Our foundation keeps to its vision of a world free of mines. You can make an important contribution to our work by bequeathing our organisation. Your legacy will offer a safer future for people still forced to live on minefields today, and it will help us advance towards a future world without mines.
For more information and FAQ on bequests, please visit www.myhappyend.org. We apologize for only providing a German and French website of myhappyend.org so far.
Ban on cluster bombs
On 3 December 2008, some 100 states signed a ban on cluster bombs, also known as submunition. The signing ceremony in Oslo was the culmination of talks that began in February of 2007 in that same city. Like the 1997 Ottawa Convention on anti-personnel mines, the ban on cluster bombs forbids their use, stockpiling, production and transfer.
Cluster bombs are vehicles for multiple small explosives or bomblets, and can be dropped from aircraft or launched from the ground. Once in the air, a cluster bomb opens and releases its contents. Unexploded bomblets left on the ground threaten human beings with dreadful mutilations and injuries, just like anti-personnel mines. Inhabitants of some 30 states around the world are directly affected by the scourge of cluster bombs.
The ban is to be implemented over the next eight years; in Switzerland, meanwhile, it must be ratified by both federal houses of parliament, and the Swiss law on military materiel must be amended.
