Syria officially becomes member of OPCW on Monday

THE HAGUE- Beginning from Monday, Syria officially becomes a member of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). The Organization’s basic document — the Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destructions, also known as the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), for short — will apply to it, according to  Itar-Tass.

Syria becoms a 190th member-state of the OPCW. At present only six countries still remain outside the Convention. Two of them – “Israel” and Myanmar — way back in 1993 signed the CWC. Only Angola, Egypt, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and South Sudan have taken no actions as regards the Convention.

On the night from September 27 to 28, the OPCW Executive Council approved a plan for the destruction of chemical weapons in Syria. The decision was adopted unanimously. Following that, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2,118 in support of the plan for the elimination of chemical weapons in the SAR. All the 15 countries of the UNSC voted for the document.

The OPCW was founded in 1997. On October 11, 2013, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced the OPCW to be a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. At a news conference held on the same day, OPCW Director-General Ahme Uzumcu expressed hope that the award bestowed upon the Organization would inspire the non-member countries to join the Organization. He emphasized tha the Nobel Committee’s decision was a pleasant surprise.

The purposes of the OPCW are chemical demilitarization and nonproliferation of chemical weapons. The CWC was signed in Paris on January 13, 1993, by 130 countries and entered into forces on April 29, 1997. The CWC is the first multilateral treaty which not only bans a whole type of weapons of mass destruction but also provides a machinery for the checking of military and civilian chemical facilities.

The CWC signatory countries account for almost 98 percent of the world’s population. Their territories take up almost the same percentage of the world’s continental area. Ninety percent of the world’s chemical industry are concentrated in these countries.

The OPCW’s supreme body is a Conference of the member-states. The Organization is headquartered in the ague.

According to OPCW data, as of July 2013, an aggregate of 57,740 metric tons, or 81.1 percent of the world’s announced stocks of chemical weapons had been eliminated.

M.D