UNITED NATIONS, May 17. /TASS/. Russia suggests the United Nations Security Council pass a resolution on the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to normalize its operation, Russia’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Vasily Nebenzya said on Friday.
"We are trying to get the OPCW back on track. Because it's slided off the track. It used to be a technical organ where consensus prevailed and now it's so completely politicized," he said, adding that the date for voting the resolution has not yet been appointed.
"We are still in consultations," he said. "We are considering when to put in on the table, the best time is when it’s ready."
The text of the resolution calls not to politicize the organization’s work.
The decision to vest the OPCW Secretariat with attributive authority, or the right to identify those responsible for the use of chemical weapons, was taken at a special session of the Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) in late June 2018. Notably, due to the specifics of the voting procedure, the decision was taken by a minority of votes, with only 82 out of the 193 member nations casting their votes for it (this much turned out to be enough as the votes of those abstaining were not taken into account). In November 2018, in defiance of Russia’s objections the OPCW voted for a decision to increase the organization’s budget by 2.4 million euros (to 69.7 million euros). The surplus will be used for creating a special attribution group. After that, the OPCW began to hire personnel for the attributive team. Russia, India, Iran, China and a number of other countries strongly objected against the attributive mechanism saying it was trespassing into the sphere of exclusive competences of the United Nations Security Council.