Washington’s Blog
September 19, 2013
Given that the U.S. has now backed down from its insistence that a UN resolution on Syria include the use of force – and there are indications that Syria won’t meet the American deadline for declaring its chemical weapons – issues of timing and procedure have become more important than ever.
We interviewed a top chemical weapons expert to find out what the timeframe really means.
Specifically, we called Jean Pascal Zanders –
widely recognized as one of the world’s top chemical weapons experts –
to find out whether U.S. insistence that Syria has to declare all of its
chemical weapons this week (and destroy them within a couple of months) was proper under international law.
Zanders explained to Washington’s Blog that the U.S. might have “preferences”, but that the international community would decide …
“I think it’s really good that the concept of disarmament has been
put center stage. But certainly, that was not the intention of Kerry and
others.
Now we have a document which is a framework that gives a number of
parameters that will be presented to the OPCW [the Organisation for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - which is the implementing organization for the Chemical Weapons Convention] at the Hague.
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