Brussels, 02/08/2010 (Agence Europe) - The entry into force, on Sunday 1 August, of the Oslo Convention on Cluster Munitions marks an essential step forward for international humanitarian law, but the European Union hopes that more countries will move to ratify it. The Convention was signed by 107 countries and 37 have ratified it. Nonetheless, great military powers such as China, Russia, the US and Israel, which own most of the world's cluster munitions, have today refused to ban the use of them. “Continued efforts are needed to increase the number of ratifications (…). The EU is deeply concerned with the tremendous humanitarian, socio-economic and development challenges still posed by the use of cluster munitions”, said Catherine Ashton, the High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs, on Sunday 1 August. The world stock of cluster munitions still numbers in excess of one billion, according to estimates of the Coalition against cluster bombs. The United Kingdom, Germany and France each have stocks estimated at around 50 million cluster bombs. These three countries, which are all signatories of the Convention, will destroy all of these munitions within eight years. According to Handicap International, the most recent use of cluster munitions was during the Israeli-Lebanese conflict in 2006, and in Georgia in 2008. (B.C./trans.fl)