The OPCW: trying to rid the world of chemical weapons

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), based in The Hague, is at the forefront of international efforts to destroy existing chemical weapons and to prevent the manufacture of new ones. The organisation, which could play a key role if Syria hands over its suspected chemical weapons to international supervision under a Russian plan, supervises the application of The Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) which is aimed at ridding the world of such arms. Syria, one of only five countries not to have signed the global treaty, said on Tuesday it had accepted the Russian proposal, as France kept up the pressure with a UN resolution threatening force if the regime failed to comply. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime is accused of using the arms in an August 21 attack that killed hundreds of people on the outskirts of Damascus. Chemical weapons were first used in combat in World War I, and also in 1988 against civilians in Halabja, Iraq. Signing of the Convention began in 1993 in Paris and it took effect on April 29, 1997. The Convention was the result of almost 20 years of negotiations within the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, and initially aimed to eliminate all chemical weapons by 2007. A precursor was the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned the use of chemical weapons following widespread use in World War I, but not their development under a "no first use" notion. The OPCW currently has 189 so-called States Parties, including nearly all industrialised nations and more than 98 percent of the world population. Israel and Myanmar have signed the Convention but not ratified it, while Angola, Egypt, North Korea, South Sudan and Syria have done neither. The CWC has four main provisions, the destruction of all chemical weapons under strict verification, monitoring of the chemical industry to prevent development, helping protect nations against chemical threats and boosting global cooperation to strengthen implementation. "It is the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire category of weapons of mass destruction and to provide for the international verification of the destruction of these weapons," according to the OPCW. It contains no specific punitive measures for countries that use chemical weapons however. The document says only that the OPCW can "in cases of particular gravity, bring the issue, including relevant information and conclusions, to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council." Between 1997 and 2013 the OPCW carried out 5,167 inspections on the territory of 86 signatory countries, including 2,720 inspections of chemical weapons sites, according to the organisation's website. Some 81 percent of world stocks of declared chemical agents have been destroyed under supervision, it says.