Pay up in the name of BW disarmament (2) – Civil society gets involved
On 2 April I described how non-payments by states parties were defunding the implementation of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) and risking to shut down the 3-person Implementation Support Unit (ISU) and the convening of meetings. A couple of weeks earlier the Ambassadors of the three Depository States – the Russian Federation, United Kingdom and United States – had written an urgent letter to the BTWC States Parties to immediately comply with their financial obligations.
Since then, the situation has ameliorated somewhat. The contracts of the ISU staff have now been extended until the end of the year. But the crisis is far from over. When I wrote my blog posting, the deficit for the BTWC stood at US$ 379,557. According to the latest update on the financial situation (31 March) this figure has been reduced to US$ 188,631.
One county stands out in this dossier: Brazil. As reported in the earlier blog post, it owed the BTWC US$ 298,459 or 78.6% of the total deficit of the BTWC. With the exception of 2011 it has defaulted on its financial obligations or paid its dues only partially since 2001. That figure has not changed, which means that its debt now exceeds the current budgetary shortfall. It exceeds the combined outstanding debt of all other states parties.
The combined outstanding debt for four weapon control agreements administered by the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs in Geneva – the BTWC, Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW), and Anti Personnel Landmine Convention (OTW) – amounts to a staggering US$ 929,112. Brazil’s share is US$ 652,657 or 70%.
Civil society rears it head
Civil society is now taking up the issue. Mary Wareham, advocacy director of the Arms Division of Human Rights Watch, has engaged Brazilian officials directly. In a Twitter exchange she elicited from Mr Benoni Belli, Policy Planner at Brazil’s Foreign Ministry, that ‘other payments will be made this year‘. Promising indeed, but promises unfortunately do not alleviate the financial problems.
The civil society platform Friends of the Biological Weapons Convention, coordinated by Kathryn Millett, has now also taken up the issue. Yesterday it posted an appeal to its Facebook page and announced the launch of an action campaign to prompt Brazil and other states to pay their assessed contributions:
On 31 March, the UN Financial Resources Management Service released a summary of the status of financial contributions to four disarmament conventions – the BWC, the Convention on Cluster Munitions, Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons and the Mine Ban Treaty.
The summary (which updated an earlier summary dated 28 Feb) demonstrated that 3 of the 4 treaties were owed almost $1 million USD by states parties in unpaid assessed financial contributions. The BWC alone is owed almost $190K by its member states.The significance of these debts cannot be overstated. New UN financial rules mean that meetings cannot take place nor can staff contracts be renewed unless the money is already in the bank. To that end, an extraordinary letter from the BWC co-depositories (Russian Fed, USA & UK) dated 21 March was sent to all states parties urging them to pay up or risk the possibility of a) not being able to renew ISU contracts past April 2017, and b) cancellation/curtailment of the 2017 Meeting of States Parties (MSP) scheduled for December.
While the BWC is hosted by the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, it is NOT an UN treaty and therefore cannot take advantage of central UN funds or reserves, nor is there a working capital fund like at the OPCW, which can be used to cover temporary financial shortcomings. In short, the BWC is fully dependent on states parties paying their dues in a timely fashion. If states do not, meetings will not happen and staff cannot work to administer the treaty.
That BWC ISU staff contracts have now been renewed until the end of the year is a very welcome development, but does not mean the BWC is out of the woods yet: the BWC does not have sufficient funds to cover the costs of the MSP in December.
Following the failure of the BWC Eighth Review Conference to achieve any meaningful progress in strengthening the convention, a successful MSP in December is more critical than ever to the continued health and relevancy of the treaty. This unsatisfactory situation is further compounded by the rise in use of non-conventional weapons by both states and non-state actors as evidenced by the situation in Syria. The norm of the Chemical Weapons Convention (the BWC’s sister convention) is under threat by the continued instances of the use of sarin and chlorine as weapons of war. The use of banned conventional weapons in warfare such as cluster munitions and landmines is also on the increase. Disarmament treaties are under threat and states parties must act to positively reinforce the norms against the use of banned weapons.
So – what can be done?Civil society across disarmament domains will be writing letters to states that are the most significantly in arrears (such as Brazil). Please do consider signing these letters (we will post the letter here from the BWC community) and also check directly with your country’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the status of their payments. If they haven’t paid their contributions, call/ email them demanding that they do so. Contact your country’s mission in Geneva and ask them what they are doing to remedy their debts. Make a noise on twitter.
If you would like more information on this situation as it progresses, please send a private message and we will get back to you. You can also read more on the issue here:
– JP Zanders, Pay up in the name of BW disarmament:https://www.the-trench.org/pay-up-in-the-name-of-bw-disarma…/
– G Koblenz & P Walker, ‘Can Bill Gates rescue the bioweapons convention?’,
Thank you all for your kind attention and for any action you can also undertake to remedy this situation. The latest UN financial summary can be found here:
It was a remarkable act. On 21 March the Permanent Representatives to the UN Conference of Disarmament of the three co-depositories of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC)—the Russian…the-trench.org
Time to act is now
Today, 22 April 2017, is the 102nd anniversary of the first modern chemical weapons attack. Chlorine is still a weapon of choice in the wars in Syria and Iraq. In both countries we have seen escalation to mustard and nerve agents. The Chemical Weapons Convention, which is as strong as a weapon control treaty gets today, is facing huge challenges to restore the basic principle of non-use under any and all circumstances. Not technical challenges, but as a consequence of the pursuit of geopolitical priorities by some key players…
While great civil society optimism is currently pushing many UN members to negotiating a ban on nuclear weapons, existing weapon control treaties are facing daily challenges. Some states are eroding value of these treaties as armed conflicts appear interminable; in other cases they simply fail to pay their dues, which undermines the tools to uphold the international norms embedded in those agreements. We simply cannot afford a breakdown in those regulatory regimes!
To this end, any stakeholder (professional or scientific association, academia), civil society organisation, or individual who wishes to preserve the four afore-mentiond international instruments to prevent of mitigate the consequences of armed conflict – the BTWC, CCM, CCW, and OTW – should contact Mary Wareham or Kathryn Millett to see how they can participate in letter campaigns or other initiatives under development.
