Whatever complacency may previously have existed about Ireland joining the NATO-led Partnership for Peace (PFP), current events in the Balkans should have well and truly shattered it.

The NATO action on Kosovo has not prevented, and may have accelerated, an outcome described as follows by Robert Fisk: "It has all gone horribly wrong . . . With Serb paramilitaries butchering their way across Kosovo and poised to drive out every last Albanian, it could not possibly be worse."

The NATO bombing has also seriously antagonised Russia and raised fears of, in the words of an Irish Times editorial (April 5th), "the start of a new Cold War".

Afri, as an organisation concerned with issues of global justice and human rights, is opposed to Irish membership of the PFP, and not only because of the Kosovo debacle. The Government is committed to joining PFP despite a Fianna Fail election manifesto pledge not to do so. We believe Irish participation in PFP would be prejudicial to the advancement of justice and human rights. This belief is based on the following propositions.

The first is that PFP is intimately connected to NATO. For any country that joins PFP, an agreement - an Individual Partnership Programme (IPP) - is negotiated directly with NATO. PFP at all times operates under the authority of the North Atlantic Council, NATO's supreme body.

If Ireland joined PFP then Ireland's ambassador to the Western European Union would become Ambassador to NATO also. NATO's Deputy Secretary-General, Sergio Balanzino, has described the PFP as being "welded to the new NATO, which means the partnership will evolve in step with the transformation of the Alliance NATO itself". More concretely, the US ambassador to NATO has described the PFP as working towards making "the difference between being a partner PFP member and being an ally NATO member razor-thin".

Our second proposition is that the NATO military alliance is dominated by the US government. By virtue of that dominance, the US government - which cannot be held accountable to the people of Europe - currently has a leading role in peacekeeping and enforcement within Europe, as evidenced by the disastrous consequences of the US-inspired NATO action on Kosovo.

And it is primarily at US insistence that the bombing has continued despite serious misgivings being expressed by other NATO members, especially Greece.

Our third proposition is that a body dominated by the US government - responsible for bombing a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, and for maintaining deadly trade embargoes against the people of Cuba and Iraq - is not well fitted to the role of international peacekeeping "referee".

The US government has been consistently obstructive towards proposals for the establishment of an International Criminal Court, although most other governments have endorsed the idea. This is not surprising because the US government has shown itself regularly willing to flout international law; such as undertaking military action in the Gulf and in the Balkans without a UN mandate, and ignoring even the dispute settlement procedures of the World Trade Organisation.

Afri's position is not based on so-called anti-Americanism; even the conservative US commentator, Samuel Huntington, has been moved to describe the US as in danger of "becoming the rogue superpower" and being seen by much of the rest of the world as "the single greatest external threat to their societies".

One result is that the US government's reputation in, for example, Africa is fatally flawed. Ireland, by contrast, and in part because of past experience of colonialism, has traditionally enjoyed a good reputation in the Third World and elsewhere, a reputation which would be seriously endangered by closer association with the dominant forces in PFP.

On the basis of the above arguments, Afri believes Ireland should not join PFP. Irish neutrality should not be a sacred cow. But Irish neutrality has had a number of positive features such as limited participation in the international arms trade, and the freedom to speak with an independent voice on global issues in a way that could not easily be dismissed as being based on self-interest.

The Government could build on this legacy and proactively use our neutrality to act as a facilitator in the areas of conflict prevention and resolution. The extent to which Irish neutrality could serve as a resource for such endeavours has been acknowledged in recent comments by the Minister of State at the Department of Foreign Affairs, Liz O'Donnell, and from the Fine Gael leader, John Bruton.

At the very least, the decision to join PFP should be put to a referendum. This would represent a commitment to an open and transparent foreign policy-making process.

Andy Storey is chairman of Afri (Action from Ireland), which seeks to alleviate poverty and hunger through education and campaigning.