The 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) bans the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons and requires their destruction. It also establishes an extensive system of declarations and inspections to verify this. The text of the CWC was agreed upon by the Conference on Disarmament in 1992. Later that year the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution based on the text of the CWC. The CWC entered into the force on 29 April 1997, and is the first multilaterally negotiated disarmament agreement which aims to ban an entire category of weapons of mass destruction in a verifiable manner.

 

To date, there are 145 States party to the convention, including all EU Member States. Other significant States that have ratified the Convention include the United States, Russia, India, Pakistan, China, Iran, Jordan and Serbia and Montenegro. The UK aims to achieve a Treaty with universal adherence, implemented on a world-wide scale in an effective manner. In order to reach this goal, as many countries as possible must ratify (or accede to) the Treaty. Adherence by States with significant nation chemical industries is of particular importance, as is adherence by States in regions of tension.

 

The UK is represented at the The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) by delegates from London and from the British Embassy in The Hague. The OPCW has made an effective start to implementing a rigorous verification and inspection regime. All State Parties to the Convention are required to submit declarations of past chemical weapons activities regular declarations about the production, processing and consumption of certain dual-use chemicals, which have possible chemical weapons applications. These declarations are verified by means of routine inspections of which over 1100 have already taken place world-wide. Additionally, a State Party can request the Organisation to conduct a Challenge Inspection if there are strong grounds for suspecting that a declaration is inaccurate or incomplete. To date no Challenge Inspections have been proposed or carried out.

 

The UK Chemical Weapons Convention National Authority is held with the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) which is responsible for the provision of the UK share of the funding of the OPCW. BERR is also provides the national representative at the Executive Council of the OPCW and oversees all OPCW inspections in the UK. There have so far been over 40 routine inspections in the UK at both defence and industrial sites. All have been passed off successfully. The UK has been permanently represented on the Council of the OPCW by virtue of the size of its chemical industry.