At the Security Council briefing on chemical weapons in Syria, western nations demanded that Syria fully cooperates with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to close outstanding issues.
Syria has submitted 17 amendments and several supplements to its initial declaration. So far, 20 out of the 24 outstanding issues remain unresolved, Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, said.
“Full cooperation is essential to closing these outstanding issues,” she added.
“The Syrian regime has used chemical weapons, on at least 8 occasions throughout the conflict,” UK Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York, Ambassador Barbara Woodward, said.
Syria had retained a chemical weapons capability in contravention of resolution 2118 of 2013 and the Chemical Weapons Convention, she noted.
US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the UN Security Council “the world should not be fooled by Syria’s veneer of cooperation.”
“While Syria deliberately delays and obstructs answers to the international chemical weapons watchdog.”
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“Syria has continued to use chemical weapons. And these facts must be qualified as crimes against humanity,” France’s UN Ambassador, Nicolas De Riviere, went further, saying.
On November 30th, the OPCW Director-General Mr. Fernando Arias stressed that the Syrian government did not cooperate with the OPCW team by not declaring about the fully stockpile of chemical weapons and it “still cannot be considered accurate and complete,” and also continuing to deny a visa to an OPCW weapons inspector.
While the representative of the Russian Federation Dmitry Polyanskiy said the Syrian chemical weapons dossier was among the most “politicized” dossiers describing the topic as a fairy tale, stating that it had nothing to do with the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
For his part, Bassam Sabbagh Syria’s representative stated that, since joining the Chemical Weapons Convention in 2013, his country has cooperated with the United Nations to eliminate its stockpiles and production facilities, a process that was completed in record time, in mid-2014
Sabbagh rejected the disinformation campaign launched by some Western nations, which have adopted a hostile policy against Syria and created the OPCW Investigation and Identification Team, adding that, as a result, reports by the OPCW Technical Secretariat have become part and parcel of a hostile Western campaign, as he put it.
This article was edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.
