However, country representatives wanted to avoid overstating the depth of the commitment in Lima, calling them "informal talks and not negotiations," French delegation leader Pierre Charasse said.

The anti-personnel weapons are dropped by the world's armies but 98 percent of victims are civilians, one-fourth of them children.

Non-governmental groups that opened the conference here on Wednesday pushed for stand-alone negotiations for an independent treaty to ban cluster bombs by 2008.

However, governments, mostly in Europe, sought to negotiate such a ban within the UN Convention on Conventional Weapons (CCW), without abandoning an initiative launched at the conference's first meeting in Oslo in February.

"European countries want negotiations within the framework of Oslo not to go backwards, while still wanting to negotiate under the auspices of the CCW," said Jean Marc Boivin, for Handicap International.

France, Germany and Poland pushed for further talks in Geneva under the UN treaty, which covers anti-personnel weapons, with non-detectable fragments or shrapnel, booby-traps, incendiary bombs and clearing unexploded ordnance.