Minamata Convention on Mercury

What Happened

On 10 October 2013, delegates from around the world gathered in Kumamoto, Japan, and adopted the Minamata Convention on Mercury, an international treaty to protect human health and the environment from emissions and releases of mercury and mercury compounds. The text had been approved earlier that year, on 19 January 2013, by delegates representing close to 140 countries meeting in Geneva, following three years of negotiation. The Kumamoto conference turned that approved text into a signed international agreement.

The convention takes aim at mercury across its entire life cycle. It sets controls on products, processes and industries where mercury is used, released or emitted, and it addresses the direct mining of mercury, its export and import, its safe storage, and its disposal as waste. It also commits governments to identifying populations at risk, improving medical care, and training health-care professionals to recognise and treat mercury-related harm.

Background

Mercury is a heavy metal that accumulates in the environment and in the human body, and the convention's purpose is to reduce the damage it does. The agreement covers a long list of everyday products containing mercury, including certain types of batteries, compact fluorescent lamps, relays, soaps and cosmetics, thermometers, and blood pressure devices. The manufacture, import and export of these products are to be prohibited by 2020, except where a country has requested an exemption for an initial five-year period. Dental fillings made with mercury amalgam are also regulated, with their use to be phased down through a series of measures.

The convention did not appear from nowhere. Its negotiation ran across three years of meetings, and the final text was approved in Geneva in January 2013 before being adopted and signed in Kumamoto that October. The choice of Kumamoto as the signing venue was deliberate, tying the treaty's birth to the region whose name it carries.

Why It Mattered

The convention is named after the city of Minamata, which suffered a devastating incident of mercury poisoning. Attaching that name to a global treaty gives the agreement a memorial function as well as a regulatory one: the city's experience is written into the instrument itself.

In practical terms, the treaty's supporters expected that over the following decades the agreement would strengthen the reduction of mercury pollution from the activities responsible for the largest releases of mercury into the immediate environment. Because the convention reaches from mining to waste disposal, it treats mercury as a single connected problem rather than a set of separate industrial issues. It also places obligations on the health side, requiring efforts to pinpoint at-risk populations and to build up medical capacity for treating mercury-related effects.

The Name in Japanese

The Japanese name of the treaty is 水俣条約, read すいぎんにかんするみなまたじょうやく (suigin ni kansuru Minamata jōyaku). The full official form is 水銀に関する水俣条約 — literally "the Minamata Convention concerning mercury" — and the short form 水俣条約 is what appears in ordinary use.

Breaking the short form down character by character:

• 水 — read mina here. The character means "water". On its own it is normally read mizu, and in Sino-Japanese compounds it is read sui.
• 俣 — read mata here. This is a Japanese-made character (kokuji, 国字), created in Japan rather than borrowed from Chinese, and it refers to a fork or a crotch — as in a place where a river splits. It appears in Japanese place names, and it has no common standalone meaning outside them.
• 条 — read jō. It means "article", "clause" or "stipulation", the unit into which a formal document is divided.
• 約 — read yaku. It means "agreement", "promise" or "compact".

Together, 条約 (jōyaku) is the standard Japanese word for "treaty" or "convention" — a formal agreement between states. So 水俣条約 is simply "the Minamata Treaty", with 水俣 being the name of the city.

The longer official phrasing adds 水銀 (suigin), the word for "mercury", written with the characters 水 ("water") and 銀 (gin, "silver") — literally "water-silver", a calque of the metal's liquid, silvery appearance. The particle に (ni) and the verb form 関する (kansuru, "concerning", "relating to") link the two halves: 水銀に関する水俣条約, "the Minamata Convention concerning mercury". Readers who know the city name Minamata will recognise it immediately in the short form, which is why the treaty is usually called 水俣条約 in Japanese rather than by its longer title.

Key Figures

The convention was adopted and signed on 10 October 2013 at a diplomatic conference in Kumamoto, Japan, in the 25th year of the Heisei era (平成25年). The Heisei period ran from 1989 to 2019, so the treaty belongs to the later part of that era.

The text adopted in Kumamoto had been approved in Geneva on 19 January 2013 by delegates representing close to 140 countries, the culmination of three years of meetings and negotiation. The treaty is named after the city of Minamata, in Kumamoto Prefecture, the site of a severe episode of mercury poisoning that gave the agreement both its name and its symbolic weight.