A simple treaty, a complex fulfillment: A short history of the Biological Weapons Convention Review Conferences

Abstract

The Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was negotiated as a simple treaty but its fulfillment has not been so simple: The convention has no monitoring or verification agency, no governing council, and no permanent secretariat. Instead, in an effort to make the treaty more robust, a body of extended understandings, definitions, and procedures have gradually been agreed upon at its first six review conferences. The Seventh Review Conference, in December 2011, can take forward this evolutionary process by building on the best elements in the treaty regime. The author writes that the upcoming review conference needs to renew the mandate of its Implementation Support Unit; authorize BWC annual meetings to make decisions to be included in a comprehensive agenda; enable States Parties to report systematically on their compliance with BWC obligations through an accountability framework; organize collective assessment of BWC-relevant developments in science and technology; update states’ annual reporting arrangements on information measures to increase transparency; and appoint a working group to consider whether confidence is best generated in the longer term by such measures or by new methods.

• biological weapons
• Biological Weapons Convention
• chemical weapons
• review conference
• Seventh Review Conference
• verification

Notes

Notes

1 In the UN General Assembly vote in 1971 to welcome the BWC and commend it for signature, France abstained and China was absent from the vote. The lack of verification was again criticized by France when it acceded to the BWC in 1984, and China criticized the general weakness of the BWC when it acceded, also in 1984.

2 To cope with the criticism that biological weapons and toxins had been hived off from the rest of the chemical weapons disarmament enterprise for prior negotiation, and that this might somehow confer a perverse legitimacy on chemical weapons because they were not being banned straight away, the treaty committed the States Parties to continuing negotiations in good faith on chemical weapons in order to reach agreement at an early date. Although negotiations were continuous from 1972, the parties took 21 years before they opened the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) for signature in 1993. The treaty did not enter into force until 1997: hardly an early date.

3 The Western Group comprises: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Holy See, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Republic of Korea, San Marino, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

4 This institutional deficit contrasts unfavorably with the Chemical Weapons Convention and with major nuclear arms control treaties (such as the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, in force since 1970, and the 1996 Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, not yet in force).

5 This would require a separate procedure under Article XI.

6 This is true absent the negotiation of a separate legal instrument such as the strengthening protocol sought from 1995 to 2001.

7 This procedure, as elaborated by later review conferences, was invoked by Cuba in 1997 (the only time it has ever been used), when it alleged a breach of the Convention by the US in October, 1996. The BWC Consultative Meeting investigated, but was unable, partly because of the passage of time, to reach a conclusion over whether the Thrips palmi infestation which hit the Cuban potato crop in December, 1996, was the result of a permitted US overflight the previous October, or whether, as the US asserted, the two events were completely unconnected.

Additional information

Author biography

Nicholas A. Sims is an Emeritus Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), where he taught from 1968 to 2010. His research and writing have specialized in disarmament treaties and their review and reinforcement. His books on the Biological Weapons Convention include The Diplomacy of Biological Disarmament (St Martin’s Press, 1988), The Evolution of Biological Disarmament (Oxford University Press for SIPRI, 2001) and The Future of Biological Disarmament (Routledge, 2009).