THE HAGUE, November 13. /TASS/. The attributive mechanism of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) will be able to begin working not earlier than February 2019, OPCW Director General Fernando Arias told journalists on Tuesday.

"The team is being created. For the time being, we have only one person already hired for this team and that will be the coordinator of this team. For the rest, we are following the rules for hiring people on the basis of human resources branch of the organization and we have advertised. I think it is eight or nine positions of different experts," he said. "The candidacies will be analyzed by the panel that has been formed and after that they will be recruited, which means that we won’t have the team ready to work until perhaps February."

"To hire people on the basis of the rules of the international organizations takes," he went on to say. "My obligation is to hire people on an equal, balanced regional representation, which means I have to keep a balance and hire people from Asia, Latin America, from Africa so that the team is more or less balanced. I cannot hire everybody from Germany or I cannot hire everybody from Western Europe. I have to keep a balance. And also I am taking into consideration for that the gender issue."

According to Arias, the team’s mandate will be "to identify the perpetrators of alleged crimes committed in Syria." Once this task is accomplished, the team will issue reports where it will say that "this person or this institution has been identified as responsible to have committed those crimes." He stressed that the team’s mandate is "to investigate and to inform" the OPCW Executive Council and the United Nations Secretary General about its findings.

"The mandate is to identify the perpetrators of crimes committed with chemical weapons, but the OPCW is not a court. We are not a court we are not police. The mandate I have received and I have to implement means to investigate, to identify the perpetrators," he stressed adding that further steps will depend on the OPCW Executive Council and the UN Secretary General. "It’s up to them to decide," he said.

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.

The Russia side has repeatedly objected against making a "punitive body" of the OPCW. According to the Russian side, once the OPCW is authorized to identify those to blame for the use of chemical weapons it will mean infringement upon the exclusive domain of the United Nations Security Council and it is not envisaged by the Chemical Weapons Convention. More to it, due to the specifics of the voting procedure, the decision was taken by a minority, 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).