Global Security Newswire

The Bahamas has become the 188th nation to join the international pact banning the production, stockpiling or use of chemical weapons, the treaty's monitoring agency announced yesterday (see GSN, April 1).

The Chemical Weapons Convention will enter into force 30 days after April 21, the date on which the island nation submitted its ratification document to the United Nations.

“The ratification of the CWC by the Bahamas draws us ever closer to our goal of realizing a universal ban on chemical weapons, and we call upon those states that have not yet adhered to the convention to do so without delay,” Rogelio Pfirter, head of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, said in a press release.

Member nations are required to declare activities that could "pose a risk to the object and purpose of the convention" and to allow inspections and other means of compliance verification by the Hague-based organization.

The remaining holdout nations are Angola, Egypt, Israel, Myanmar, North Korea, Somalia and Syria.

Syria and North Korea are both believed to maintain sizable stocks of chemical warfare materials, while Egypt is understood to have used such agents in Yemen in the 1960s. Israel also at one point is believed likely to have possessed a military chemical program, according to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons release, April 23).