Updated February 2010

John Bolton, Former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N.
Source: photos.state.gov

The next opportunity to strengthen the BWC's inspection and enforcement provisions came at the Fifth BWC Review Conference, held in Geneva from 19 November to 7 December 2001, at a time when anthrax-tainted letters were front-page news in the United States. The meeting was the fifth in a series of BWC review conferences, which are held at five-year intervals to assess the implementation of the Convention and to devise measures for strengthening it. In attendance were 91 of the then 144 states parties to the BWC. Many of the member states had hoped that the Fifth Review Conference would approve a formal mechanism for checking compliance with the BWC, but that was not the case.

Given the collapse of the Ad Hoc Group negotiations, a key objective of the Fifth Review Conference was to develop alternative strategies for strengthening the BWC. At the outset of the conference, the head of the U.S. delegation, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, accused six states of violating the BWC: Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea (all parties to the Convention); Syria (which has signed but not ratified); and Sudan (which did not sign until October 2003). Bolton insisted that the Conference's Final Declaration refer to the problem of noncompliance, but several countries, led by Iran, objected to the U.S.-proposed language.

As an alternative to the BWC Protocol, which Bolton stated bluntly was "dead, and is not going to be resurrected," the United States offered a package of nine measures that could be implemented through national legislation. The U.S.-proposed measures included:

• criminalizing the acquisition and possession of biological weapons;
• restricting access to dangerous microbial pathogens and toxins;
• supporting the World Health Organization's global system for disease surveillance and control;
• establishing an ethical code of conduct for scientists working with dangerous pathogens;
• contributing to an international team that would provide assistance in fighting outbreaks of infectious disease; and
• strengthening an existing UN mechanism for conducting field investigations of alleged biological weapons use so that BWC member states would be required to accept investigations on their territory.