UNITED NATIONS, April 13. /TASS/. Russia calls an informal meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Friday to discuss topics linked with ungrounded accusation against Syria and other countries of the use of weapons of mass destruction, Russian First Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations Dmitry Polyansky said on Tuesday.
"On April 16, we will hold an informal Arria-formula virtual meeting on the topics of defending developing countries from political pressure under the pretext of ungrounded accusations of the use of weapons of mass destruction," he wrote on his Telegram channel. "Naturally, special attention will be focused on Syria, which is subject of the West’s sophisticated campaign in the recent time."
"We are very concerned over the ongoing politicization of the activities of the OPCW (Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons - TASS), whose reputation was seriously damaged after large-scale violations of its Technical Secretariat on a numbers of episodes of the Syrian chemical dossier were exposed," Polyansky noted.
"The rapporteurs will be a number of nonproliferation experts, whose names will be disclosed later to protect them from possible pressure from those who are unwilling to correct the above mentioned tendencies," he added.
Arria-formula meetings have been practiced since 1992 and received their name from Venezuelan Ambassador Diego Arria, who initiated this format.
An Arria-formula meeting can be called by any Security Council member who can invite rapporteurs from among public figures or non-government organizations. Other nations cannot block such a meeting but can dodge participation. Such meetings are not held at the Security Council premises and yield no resolutions or official documents.