CSTO States note the danger of politicizing the OPCW

CSTO States call on their dialogue partners within the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to return consensus and equality to this platform amid the threat of politicization of its agenda. This is said in a joint statement issued by the CSTO at the 26th session of the Conference of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), TASS reports.
The document posted on the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs on December 8 reads that the CSTO states “call on the States Parties to the CWC to move towards real cooperation through information exchange and consultation between themselves within the framework of the Convention and other relevant existing international mechanisms, in particular, legal assistance, to which they are parties,” reads the statement. “Such an approach is a prerequisite for achieving the universal coverage of the Convention that remains one of the cornerstones of the international security and disarmament architecture.”
At the same time, the CSTO notes that the OPCW Technical Secretariat’s mandate “must not exceed the framework clearly defined by the provisions of the Convention” and that decisions to deny rights to States Parties to the Convention must be based “exclusively on reliable and verifiable facts and conclusions, and not on reports of the Technical Secretariat’s Investigation and Identification Team with attribution functions, which raises many questions in this context.”
The CSTO also insists that the work of the OPCW special missions in Syria established in consultation with the government of that country must comply with the “letter and spirit of the Convention.” “Deviation from these requirements is unacceptable,” the document reads.