Lebanon is set to become the 185th member state to the international treaty banning development, possession and use of chemical weapons, the pact's oversight body announced Friday (see GSN, May 23).
The Middle Eastern state submitted its document of accession to the Chemical Weapons Convention on Nov. 20. The nation will formally become a treaty party 30 days after the United Nations confirms that it has received the document, according to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.
“Lebanon’s accession draws us closer to the convention’s goal of the universal ban on chemical weapons, and we call upon those 10 remaining states that have not yet adhered to the CWC to do so without delay,” OPCW chief Rogelio Pfirter said in a press release (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons release, Nov. 28).
The convention has been signed but not ratified by four nations -- the Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, Israel and Myanmar. Another six countries -- Angola, Egypt, Iraq, North Korea, Somalia and Syria -- have never signed the pact.
Iraq in the post-Hussein era has for years been considered a likely recruit to the chemical nonproliferation regime. Baghdad's accession is "more imminent than ever," said OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan, acknowledging that the organization had hoped that would have occurred by now.
In some states, membership is "an issue of attention and process" rather than any indication that they might be holding chemical weapons, Luhan said. He said the Bahamas and the Dominican Republic appear on track to become CWC states in the next year.
The "hard-core" cases are Egypt, Israel, North Korea and Syria, where potential treaty membership is wrapped up within larger issues of security and concerns about other unconventional weapons programs, according to Luhan. It will take a significant amount of work to bring those nations into the regime, he said (Chris Schneidmiller, Global Security Newswire, Dec. 1).
Chemical weapons arsenals have been declared by six treaty states -- Albania, India, Libya, Russia, the United States and an unidentified nation widely assumed to be South Korea (see GSN, Oct. 17). Albania and South Korea have eliminated their stockpiles, while the other nations save Libya have ongoing disposal operations.
Roughly 58 percent of the known 78,000-ton global stockpile of chemical warfare material remains to be destroyed, the Associated Press reported (Associated Press/Canadaeast.com, Nov. 28).