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BWC Parties Issue Document Without Recommendations By David Ruppe WASHINGTON — Struggles over mustering action to improve compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention continued last week, as an annual meeting of treaty parties in Geneva issued a statement containing no recommendations or commitments (see related GSN story, today). The parties in the statement “agreed on the value of” improving disease surveillance and developing national response, investigation and mitigation capabilities — the two principal subjects for discussion on the agenda. Earlier versions of the document had contained stronger wording for those areas, in which states “agreed to improving, wherever possible, national and regional disease surveillance capabilities” and “agreed to continue to develop their own national capacities for response, investigation and mitigation,” according to Jean Pascal Zanders, who directs the Geneva-based Bioweapons Prevention Project The final document also said nations could consider recommendations for action that were made by a meeting of states experts last July. “It’s a weak document obviously. It’s not substitute for any efforts to strengthen the treaty,” he said. “Any commitment was taken out of the text,” he said. In addition, the only proposal for joint, multiparty action that was under consideration, a letter urging the U.N. secretary general to consider measures for strengthening his capabilities for investigating suspicious biological weapons use, was excluded from the final statement, said Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a professor at the University of New York at Purchase. “There was no willingness whatsoever for taking any kind of even the mildest action. … There was no sense of a joint international view on the subject of controlling biological weapons,” she said. Positives SeenZanders said that the statement nevertheless could be viewed as a positive development because of apparent opposition early in the week by Iran, which had argued instead for negotiations to update the treaty with a verification protocol. “The mere fact that there was a document at all was relevant because at one point it didn’t look like it was forthcoming,” he said. Another positive outcome, he said, was that the statement appeared to suggest the two discussion issues be made items of consideration at the sixth review conference of the treaty in 2006, which is the formal venue for updating the treaty. “One of the things we feared … is that there would be nothing to consider at the sixth review conference,” Zanders said. The previous meeting of states parties last year did not produce a statement (see GSN, Nov. 18). The meeting last week was the second of three scheduled prior to the review conference. The meetings, proposed by the United States in 2002 after it scuttled efforts to adopt a treaty protocol, have been criticized for lacking authority to compel action toward improving treaty compliance and for lacking sufficient time to seriously discuss their respective issues. U.S. Ambassador Donald Mahley, on the other hand, said in a Dec. 6 speech at the start of the meeting that the process was a success simply because of the discussions that occurred during the experts meeting. “The results that emerged indicated that, notwithstanding differing domestic arrangements, states parties to the BWC are following, and enhancing, similar basic approaches relating to surveillance, detection, diagnosis, and combating of infectious diseases affecting humans, animals and plants, regardless of their origin,” he said. “All of these efforts will contribute to combating the BW threat in practical ways, thereby strengthening the norms set forth in the Biological Weapons Convention,” Mahley added.
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