Good news on the prohibition of Chemical Weapons
ROGELIO PFIRTER, Director-General, Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), said that, backed by increasing support from the international community, the OPCW was moving decisively from newness into solid maturity. To date, it had visited over 750 facilities in over 65 countries, and was close to conducting inspection number 2,000. Fortunately, the verification regime set out in the Chemical Weapons Convention was considered the “most complex and ambitious in the history of multilateral disarmament”.
Reminding delegates that States Parties to the Convention had adopted two action plans, one on national implementation and the other on universality, he said that, regarding the former, States Parties had decided that by November 2005 they would have to take stock of progress made in developing and enacting the national legislation required by the Convention. Currently, he felt that many Member States were still lagging behind when it came to implementing and enforcing legislation and customs controls. In that context, he reminded delegates that the OPCW was ready and willing to provide assistance to any State that requested it, as part of the Organisation’s implementation-support programmes.
With respect to the second action plan, on universality, he reported that the OPCW now comprised 166 Member States and had been strengthened by the accession of Libya, which, last December, had admitted to possessing chemical weapons. Currently, the Organisation’s inspectors were supervising Libya’s disarmament and evaluating its request for a former weapons production facility to be converted into a pharmaceuticals centre. Iraq had also expressed a willingness to join the Convention once it had an elected government in power. Turning to other countries in the Middle East and on the KoreanPeninsula that wished to keep their chemical weapon option, he refused to feel any sympathy with them, saying that such arms constituted a “heinous means of terror and destruction”.
Besides Libya, other countries were making progress as well, he noted. For example, the United States had destroyed over 30 per cent of its arsenal, and India, which had destroyed 80 per cent of its stockpile, was running ahead of schedule with its disarmament campaign. Although more needed to be done in the Russian Federation, which possessed the largest arsenal, it was now moving ahead. Also, Albania, which had recently declared a small arsenal, was currently working with the OPCW to plan a destruction campaign.
