“The Day of Remembrance for All Victims of Chemical Warfare is an occasion to mourn those who have suffered from these inhumane arms and to renew our resolve to eradicate them from our world.”
– UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Its broad aim is to eliminate all chemical weapons from the world and prevent their re-emergence. The United Kingdom signed the Convention in 1993, ratified it in 1996 and has been bound by it since 1997.
Since 2006, 29 April has been designated a United Nations Observance to “pay tribute to the victims of chemical warfare, as well as to reaffirm the commitment of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to the elimination of the threat of chemical weapons, thereby promoting the goals of peace, security, and multilateralism.”
It hosted the fifteenth and final International Chemical Weapons Demilitarisation Conference in 2012 (read Minister of State for the Armed Forces Sir Nick Harvey’s speech here), and attended the recent third Review Conference of the Chemical Weapons Convention earlier this month (read Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State Alistair Burt’s speech here).
Chemical weapons, like all weapons of mass destruction, are a terrible misapplication of scientific endeavour and have no place in the modern world. SIN Canada does not get the opportunity to work on counter-proliferation very often, but fully backs the UK position that the six non-signatory states (Angloa, Egypt, North Korea, Somalia, South Sudan and Syria) and two non-ratifying states (Burma and Israel) should do the right thing and bring the CWC into force as soon as possible.
As always, SIN resources are available to forge UK-Canada links in scientific projects related to the non-proliferation of chemical weapons. Feel free to get in touch!