Chemical Weapons Convention
What is
it?
The Chemical Weapons
Convention, which took place in 1993, asks parties to eliminate all their chemical
weapons within ten years and forbids the “future development, production, stockpiling, transfer, and use” of
chemical weaponry.
Verification
The Convention created the international Organization
for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to inspect facilities of member
states to verify that they are complying with the treaty.
Verification
has become a problem for the CWC because in the process of trying to maintain
their rights, member states have opened loopholes in which deceit can take
place. First, inspectors may only
detect those chemicals that are listed in the treaty, so if a country creates a
new chemical for destructive purposes, the inspectors will not be able to
detect it. “Other rules approved
by the Conference of States Parties [the decision-making section of OPCW] enable
member states to confiscate and retain any piece of analytical equipment that
host-country officials believe has not been satisfactorily cleared of
proprietary data unrelated to treaty compliance, and to review inspectors’
notebooks.” Member states have the
some opportunity to hide data that they do not want revealed.1
1Article from Center for
Non-proliferation Studies
Complete text of
Chemical Weapons Convention + plus signatories and ratifications
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