Global Security Newswire

THE HAGUE, Netherlands -- State observers of an international chemical weapons ban this week aired recommendations on maximizing the enforcement muscle of the treaty's implementing agency as it undergoes significant downsizing in coming years.

Equipping the watchdog with new inspection tools and prompting more nations to allow multiple inspections in a single trip were among possibilities presented by nations taking part in the third Chemical Weapons Convention review conference, which began on Monday. The gathering is intended to scrutinize treaty operations since the previous review conference in 2008 and to chart broad implementation goals for the next half-decade.

Verifying destruction of the once-massive chemical stockpiles left from the Cold War has been a core objective of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons since its 1997 inception. However, the international agency will soon face "a significant reduction in its workload to verify the destruction of the now-dwindling stockpiles," OPCW Director General Ahmet Üzümcü said on Monday in his opening remarks to the conference.

Üzümcü previously said his organization would require around 40 inspectors -- less than one-third its current number -- once the last declared warfare stocks are destroyed and the agency shifts its primary focus to ensuring countries and nonstate actors do not harness chemical industry sites for weapons activities. The United States is now on track to be the last present CWC member holding banned materials, with demilitarization operations due to wrap up by 2023.

"A sudden reduction of resources for any institution can rapidly erode its capabilities, its expertise, its institutional memory and indeed its ability to carry on the remaining tasks," Üzümcü stated on Monday. "The capabilities that the OPCW has developed over the years ... are rare and cannot be easily found elsewhere."

In remarks to the gathering on Tuesday, Australia predicted an increased focus on monitoring facilities capable of contributing to chemical-weapon operations but not known to be manufacturing or handling substances covered by the convention's schedules. Such sites -- referred to as "other chemical production facilities" -- are chosen at random to undergo inspection.

"The OCPF regime will become an even more important element of the routine verification of the CWC in years to come," Australian Ambassador Neil Mules said on Tuesday in a speech to the gathering.

He "welcomed" revisions introduced last year to the OPCW process for selecting sites for audit. An agency analysis says the changed procedure succeeded "in targeting OCPFs in accordance with their relevance."

China, though, cited "the OPCF site selection methodology" as one of several "outstanding issues" requiring attention. Such chemical sites as of 2010 accounted for 4,275 of the 4,910 industry plants subject to possible OPCW scrutiny; the vast majority of sites inspected under the new selection criteria were in Asia and Western Europe.

South Korea urged more member nations to permit visiting inspectors to conduct audits of several facilities in a single trip. Only 52 of the treaty's 188 signatories permit "sequential inspections," even though such checks can substantially improve inspection efficiency, Deputy Foreign Minister Kim Bong-hyun stated.

"We have to continue to optimize our limited human and financial resources without compromising our purposes set forth in the convention," Kim said.

Australia voiced similar support for the auditing practice, and separately called for agency inspectors to receive data that would enable them to check for more "degradation products" of scheduled chemical armaments and riot control agents. The OPCW Analytical Database at present does not include identifying characteristics of certain materials generated from the breakdown of controlled weapon-usable chemicals, potentially limiting the ability of inspectors to determine whether controlled material was once present at a specific location.

Providing that data "would assist the OPCW preparedness to conduct investigations of alleged use" of chemical arms, Mules stated.

Separately, the 120-nation Nonaligned Movement stressed the danger of enforcement operations impinging on the "economic or technological developments of states parties." China sounded a similar note when it asserted that reforms to chemical industry inspections should not place "extra burdens on states parties."