UNITED NATIONS, May 16. /TASS/. Russia has initiated a United Nations Security Council draft resolution calling to restore constructive cooperation within the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).
"[The UN Security Council] emphasizes the need to unite the efforts of States Parties to the convention in order to enhance strict compliance with their obligations under the convention avoiding politicization," the draft says. "[The UN Security Council] calls on the States Parties to the Convention to cooperate with each other in a constructive manner and seek to restore the spirit of consensus in the OPCW for the sake of preserving the integrity and inviolability of the Convention."
The draft stresses the responsibility of the OPCW member nations to implement the Chemical Weapons Convention, including the destruction of chemical arsenals and "strongly encourages States that have not acceded to the Convention to do so without further delay."
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.