Moscow Concerned over Politicization of OPCW Activities: Lavrov

MOSCOW- Russia supports the overcoming of crisis and the improvement of the situation in the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Tuesday ahead of negotiations with OPCW Director-General Fernando Arias Gonzalez, according to Itar Tass.

“The situation in the OPCW is unsatisfactory,” he noted. “The organization is practically split due to constant attempts to politicize various aspects of the organization’s activities.”

“The creation of groups under so-called attribution is alarming,” Lavrov said. “It is a rudest violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention,” the Russian foreign minister noted. “When the convention, which is based on the principle of consensus by definition, is changed by voting, it naturally creates a very nervous situation and gives a bad example to other international organizations.”

 “Being seriously concerned about the situation in the sphere of the OPCW’s activity, being one of the states that conscientiously performed all its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, Russia is interested in overcoming the current crisis,” Lavrov went on, Tass said.

All countries’ efforts should be united to improve OPCW situation

In light of this, he called on the OPCW director-general to use his “rich experience and the ability to search for consensus and listen to the positions and approaches of all states and help find compromises” in the current difficult period.

“We are confident that only through uniting the efforts of all the countries that realized the scale of the problems it is possible to improve the situation in the OPCW and return this organization, its work into a normal, consensual state without any politicization,” the minister highlighted.

 H.M