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Talks to Prepare for BWC Negotiations Conclude
Twenty-six countries today were scheduled to finish a two-day meeting on preparations for negotiations later this year on the Biological Weapons Convention, Agence France-Presse reported (see GSN, Jan. 9). The United States and other Group of Eight nations, Asian countries and India and Pakistan took part in the Tokyo talks. Discussions focused on U.S. opposition to setting up a verification body for the treaty. The fifth treaty review conference ended in 2002 with the failure to create such an oversight body (see GSN, Dec. 10, 2001). Washington had withdrawn from the talks, arguing that inspections could reveal U.S. security and trade secrets, according to AFP. Iran, China, Russia, Pakistan and India have also been hesitant to allow international inspections, AFP reported The next review conference is set to begin in November in Geneva. “The Tokyo conference is aimed at lubricating the conference with oil by offering an unofficial meeting before the Geneva meeting in November,” a Japanese Foreign Ministry official said (Agence France-Presse/DefenseNews.com, Feb. 14). The United States would not negotiate any verification mechanism at the conference, said Carolyn Leddy, senior adviser to the U.S. State Department’s International Security and Nonproliferation Bureau. The agency is open to other proposals, she said at the Tokyo conference. “In examining any of these proposals, litmus test for the United States will be their relevance to the post-9/11 international security environment in which we cannot remain passive, but must succeed in our efforts to eliminate the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Anything less is not an option,” Leddy said, according to a State Department release. The release notes criticism of the United States for its stance against a treaty inspections body. Leddy said the United States “supports meaningful, dynamic and proactive strategies to confront proliferation, but we will not accept lowest common denominator approaches which will have little, if any, effect.” Member nations “should ask themselves not what the Biological Weapons Convention can do for them” but rather how they can reduce the WMD threat, she said. “The simple answer [is to] act responsibly,” according to Leddy. She called on individual states to act to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction. “Multilateral commitments are only as effective as the actions undertaken by states themselves to implement such commitments,” she said. “Absent national ownership, multilateral obligations are simply empty rhetoric. And, unfortunately, we know all too well that rhetoric does not make us any safer from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction,” Leddy added. Leddy said the United States has taken several key initiatives, including developing a national strategy against weapons of mass destruction, supporting a U.N. resolution criminalizing WMD proliferation, and establishing the Proliferation Security Initiative to stop WMD transport (U.S. State Department release, Feb. 14).
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