Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC)

The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on their Destruction, more usually called the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was concluded by the Conference on Disarmament (CD) in 1993 after some 20 years of desultory negotiations.

The political conditions, given urgency as a consequence of Saddam Hussein's development, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons, enabled governments to apply a comprehensive approach to chemical weapons threats by establishing a nondiscriminatory prohibition regime that required all the existing chemical weapons arsenals to be verifiably dismantled and destroyed.

The CWC entered into force in 1997 with the most fully defined and intrusive verification regime ever developed. At time of writing there are 174 states parties to the treaty. A further 12 states have signed but not ratified, while 8 remain outside the treaty.

Latest Additions

• The Relevance of Gender for Eliminating Weapons of Mass Destruction
  by Carol Cohn with Felicity Hill and Sara Ruddick, Disarmament Diplomacy, No.80, Autumn 2005.
• Security Council Resolution 1540: WMD and Non-state Trafficking
  by Merav Datan, Disarmament Diplomacy, No.79, April/May 2005.

CWC Conference of States Parties

There is an annual conference of states parties to the CWC. The 2005 meeting was held from November 7 to 11 in The Hague.

Official Documents from the annual conferences are available at: http://www.opcw.org/html/global/c_series/csp10/c10docsmenu.html.

First CWC Review Conference, 2003

From 28 April to 9 May 2003, the First Chemical Weapons Convention Review Conference took place in The Hague.

• The CWC After Its First Review Conference : Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty? by Alexander Kelle, Disarmament Diplomacy, No. 71, June - July 2003.

Background and documents and statements from the Review Conference are available at our CWC archive.

Resources

• Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), includes text of the CWC and signatories
• Harvard Sussex Program on CBW armament and arms limitation
• Monterey Institute of International Studies, CBW Resource page
• Strengthening the Chemical Weapons Convention, from the Department of Peace Studies, University of Bradford

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© 2003 The Acronym Institute.