At the 2026 NPT Review Conference in New York

From late April to 22 May 2026, states parties met at UN Headquarters in New York for the Eleventh Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Yerdaulet Rakhmatulla took part as a youth delegate at the invitation of the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) and as a social media youth correspondent for the conference.

In New York, he joined an intergenerational panel, an art exhibition at Poster House and meetings with UN disarmament teams. With fellow alumni of the UN Youth4Disarmament Forum, he met the Office of the President of the General Assembly to make the case for continued investment in youth initiatives. He also contributed to joint civil society statements.

The conference closed on 22 May without a consensus outcome document, the third review conference in a row to do so. In an op-ed for The Astana Times, Yerdaulet reviewed Kazakhstan’s role at the conference, including its chairing of Main Committee II on non-proliferation, and argued that the final draft gave too little weight to the lasting harm of nuclear testing. He called on states to treat the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons as complementary to the NPT and to attend its first review conference at the end of 2026.