Biological and Chemical Weapons
BWC Protocol Negotiations Glacial
CBW Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 6 (August 1999)
Negotiations to iron out a verification protocol to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) continue to progress slowly in Geneva, with the recent conclusion of the Ad Hoc Group’s sixteenth session on 23 July. Efforts to finalize the protocol’s rolling text, in its ninth incarnation as the latest session opened, have now moved into their third year. Although sections dealing with confidentiality, legal issues, and organizational structure are relatively well-developed, some of the most critical and controversial sections of the agreement are far from finished, namely technical cooperation and compliance measures.
Some governments continue to press toward the goal of concluding the protocol negotiations by the end of 1999. In May, the European Union Council reached a common position delineating components of an effective protocol. The European Union and ten additional European countries stated their collective concerns on 29 June about the pace of the discussions and the long-term threat to negotiating momentum if decisive action does not come soon. Other governments are not approaching the negotiations with the same sense of urgency.
Legislation currently floating around Capitol Hill may energize the US role in the protocol negotiation process by requiring deeper examination of potential monitoring approaches. On 28 July, the Senate Foreign Relations committee reported out on a bill calling for an in-depth analysis of the risks and benefits to corporate competitiveness and national security of clarification visits at US installations. The legislation required the government to host a series of trial inspections at facilities, including vaccine production plants, pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies, and defense installations, to identify monitoring procedures that might balance national security and commercial confidentiality concerns.
Having already met three times in 1999, the Ad Hoc Group has scheduled another two sessions during the latter half of the year. Originally, participants aimed to complete the protocol this year, allowing enough time for a special signing conference well in advance of the Fifth Review Conference in 2001. However, given the complexity of the remaining issues and narrow time constraints, the likelihood of an agreement being reached before the turn of the century is slim.