UNITED NATIONS, November 7. /TASS/. Fernando Arias, Director-General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), is afraid to face the UN Security Council over violations regarding the activity of the organization’s Technical Secretariat, Russia’s First Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Dmitry Polyansky told a meeting of the Security Council looking into the Syrian chemical weapons dossier.
"A new report of the OPCW director-general differs from the previous one in exactly two sentences. What is the point of convening a separate meeting of the Security Council to discuss them?" the diplomat asked.
"It turns out that we are meeting for the sake of meeting, and we are meeting only so that Western capitals can tick off their list and report that the frequency of meetings on the Syrian chemical weapons dossier is maintained at the same level," Polyansky said. Representatives from China and Brazil also expressed doubts during the meeting about the expediency of convening it.
"But since we are all meeting today anyway, let me touch on a subject that is becoming increasingly scandalous. We are grateful to the Ghanaian presidency for inviting the [OPCW] director-general to brief the Security Council," the deputy UN envoy said. "His refusal was predictable. It has become obvious that he is in horror of publicly facing the axe for the blatant violations in the work of the OPCW Technical Secretariat that he heads," Polyansky stressed.
According to Polyansky, if these mistakes are not corrected, the international weight of the OPCW will irreversibly decay. "On the two occasions when Fernando Arias did dare to address the UN Security Council in person, we asked him a number of specific questions about violations in the work of the Technical Secretariat," the diplomat said. "In December 2020, we handed them over to the director general in writing and also distributed them among the council members. We still haven't gotten any substantive answers in almost two years," Polyansky stressed.