MOSCOW, November 2. /TASS/. Replacement of international law by "makeshift rules", formulated by the US-led Western countries, fans tensions in the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons and fuels confrontation on this international platform, Russia's representative to the OPCW, Alexander Shulgin, told an online briefing on Tuesday.
He said that originally the OPCW, created in 1997, gained wide acclaim and even earned a Nobel Peace Prize as a disarmament organization, but "in recent years the picture turned for the worse."
"The reason is a small group of US-led countries set out to dictate its own rules in this organization. In other words, they set course towards replacing international law - in this particular case the Chemical Weapons Convention - by their far-fetched makeshift rules," he said.
"A clear indication of this trend," Shulgin said, can be seen in the "2018 decision the western countries managed to push through" to delegate totally irrelevant functions of "policing and prosecution" to the Technical Secretariat, which is the OPCW's purely administrative body.
"This is a gross violation of the Chemical Weapons Convention and harms the exclusive prerogatives of the UN Security Council," he said. "As a result of this harmful policy by a group of US-led Western countries tensions in the organization are soaring and the organization itself begins to deal with totally different things and deviates from its technical mission."
Shulgin said that Moscow did not see a "constructive mood" on the part of its Western partners.
"We are calling on them for an equitable and mutually respectful dialogue and mutual regard for the parties' interests," Shulgin said. "Regrettably, our calls remain without a proper response. Such an attitude causes degradation of the situation on the OPCW platform. It is a situation of endless clashes and confrontation".