CWC Review: Odd result reported?
So it appears that the AFP has gotten enough information together to justify putting out a couple of reports on the results of the 2nd CWC Review Conference. The first addresses the thorny problem of CW demilitarization. Although the report is welcome it raises many more questions than it answers.
The CW demilitarization process has been running very seriously behind schedule. The extent of the problem can be described in several ways some of which make it look worse than others. For instance, with the exception of Albania, which had a trivial CW stockpile, no State Party (SP) has met its CWC deadline (29 April 2007) for completing the process of destroying all CW stockpiles and associated facilities. All of the SPs required extensions to allow them to legitimately extend their destruction efforts beyond 2007.
However, this bald observation overlooks very important details. For instance, although India obtained an extension of its deadline the new date was only 28 April 2009 and in early 2008 India indicated that it had already destroyed 93% of its Cat. 1 CW. By contrast, both Russia and the United States have requested and secured the maximum possible extension of five years allowing them to extend their efforts out to April 2012, not that anyone is particularly confident that they will successfully complete destruction by that date either. Then we have Libya which joined the CWC to great acclaim in early 2004. To date it has not even begun destruction of its admittedly small stockpile. Although there was great optimism at first and the United States was pledged to assist with the destruction process those arrangements broke down in 2007 leading to some uncertainty about exactly how or when Libya will begin to fulfill its obligations.
So anyway, it is with some “curiosity” that I read the AFP report that the CWC SPs have “agreed on Saturday a new global deadline of 2012″ for CW destruction. It goes on to note that the United States, Russia, India and Libya “previously had individual deadlines, some of them earlier than 2012, but have signed up to the revised founding treaty.” In addition to the problem that this report makes no mention of South Korea (sorry, my bad), An Unnamed State Party, it is painfully uninformative about the impact of this decision. For instance,does this mean that India is no longer obliged to destroy its Cat. 1 CW stockpile by April 2009? How will this “global deadline” be implemented Unless the RevCon took additional decisions all that has been adopted is a political declaration which cannot of itself adjust individual SP deadlines. Does this mean that the SPs in question, specifically India, Libya and the ROK will all be coming to the next Executive council session with draft decisions extending their destruction deadlines? If this is the case the decision can only be seen as counter-productive, especially in the Libyan case where the goal should be to accelerate destruction efforts rather than postpone them.
The one positive outcome of this aspect of the final declaration, which is being presented by AFP as modifying the CWC, itself a problematic contention given that the RevCon is not an amendment conference, is that it may make life a little easier for any CW possessor states that join the convention prior to 2012. At present if Syria, to pick an example, were to join the CWC next week it would already be in technical non-compliance for not destroying its CW stockpile by the treaty deadline of April 2007, an awkward position to be in at the start of one’s membership in an organization. Of course any new members would still face a very constrained timeline for destruction and it will be interesting to see how the OPCW proposes to deal with any new CW possessor members that join after 2012, or alternatively that join so close to the April 2012 deadline that they cannot possibly meet it. Still for the moment at least this is a largely hypothetical question. Furthermore the situation of these states may potentially be addressed by the effort to deal with the Russian and US cases in the run-up to 2012. Current US destruction plans have the potential to extend out as far as 2023 and Russia is not expected to meet the 2012 deadline. At some point the question of how to square this timeline with the requirements of the CWC will have to be comprehensively addressed.
So anyway, just an initial thought or two based on what may be an incomplete report. Hopefully things will become much clearer once the final declaration is actually publicly released.
Tags: 2nd CWC RevCon, chemical weapons, CWC