ON March 22 two years ago, a country submitted for consideration by diplomats at the United Nations Conference on Disarmament meeting in Geneva an explanatory paper on its initiative on an international convention for the suppression of acts of chemical terrorism.

That country was the Russian Federation.

Article 2 of the proposed convention reads: “Any person commits an offence within the meaning of this convention if that person unlawfully and intentionally uses chemical weapon to commit an action intended to cause death to a civilian or any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict or to cause serious bodily injury, when the purpose of such action, by its nature or context, is to intimidate population or to compel public authorities or an international organisation to do or to abstain from doing any act.”

Explaining its global relevance, the Russian proposal asserted: “The issue of chemical terrorism is extremely topical today in the light of the increasing occurrences of use of not only toxic industrial chemicals but also standard chemical warfare. 

“Chemical terrorism has already become a fact of life and demands that we take decisive and urgent steps on the basis of strictly defined and comprehensive international norms.”

It is, ironically, extremely topical today, but not in the way diplomats from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs meant it to be in mid-March 2016.

Russia admitted candidly that the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) places a “rather limited number of obligations” on its member states with regard to “criminal prosecution of persons involved in activities that it prohibits. The provisions of CWC do not meet today’s demands and standards in the field of counter-terrorism.”

That was indeed a perceptive observation.

Russia also recalled the key relevance of the International Convention for the Suppression of Terrorist Bombings (from  December 15 1997), describing it as “another legal instrument that concerns chemical weapons,” but with a limited scope, “first, to the use of ‘a lethal device,’ second, to specified locations in which such a device is used and thirdly, to the intent to cause death, serious bodily injury or extensive destruction of a place, facility or system.”

In contrast, Russia argued, the scope of application of the new convention proposed by the Russian Federation would “not be limited by such restrictions. We could also include other specific provisions, eg related to the management of chemical weapons seized from terrorists.”

The proposal also pointed out that the “initiative belongs equally to the fields of disarmament, non-proliferation and counter-terrorism. 

“While non-proliferation is one dimension of combating chemical terrorism, disarmament is clearly another. If terrorists were to gain access to the production facilities, infrastructure and chemicals needed to produce such weapons, it would be only a matter of time before their production, proliferation and use occurred,” adding presciently: “Given the transboundary nature and ever-growing level of the terrorist threat, the targets and scale of resultant terrorist attacks could eventually go beyond what we have seen until now. They could become even more inhuman and large-scale, and include provocation and punitive measures against persons considered to be undesirable or dissidents.” Indeed so.

Alexey Borodavkin, the permanent representative of the Russian Federation to the United Nations Office in Geneva told the Conference on Disarmament on March 29 2016: “No-one said that our initiative somehow affected their national interests and thus under no circumstances could serve as a basis for consensus.”

He added: “Some partners draw attention to the fact that the topics we propose are not fully disarmament-related. This is true, but there is a disarmament dimension about it,” concluding: “It is important to underline that we do not consider the draft elements of the convention as an exhaustive document.”

At a subsequent meeting of the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, held on August 4 2016 a public plenary received further details from the Russian Federation on the draft convention, in which it argued that Russia “was gravely concerned that the conference remained at a standstill.”

The Chinese disarmament ambassador thanked Russia for providing an updated draft of the convention, stressing China believed that the risk of biological and chemical terrorist attacks was rising sharply, which was why the topic was highly relevant and deserved the utmost consideration of all delegations.

In a collection of interviews with international diplomatic specialists published at the end of June 2016, PIR Centre, an independent non-governmental organisation based in Russia, revealed the diverse thinking on the Russian toxin weapons convention proposals.

Adam Sheinman, special representative of the president of the United States on nuclear non-proliferation, objected to Russia’s proposals, arguing in PIR Centre’s e-bulletin Yaderny Kontrol that “this issue could be solved in the framework of existing agreements and initiatives such as UN security council resolution 1540, which is now going through a comprehensive review concerning its implementation.”            

In a joint article in the US-based but internationally focused Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, published in June 2016, Oliver Meier, deputy head of the international security division at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, and Ralf Trapp, an independent international consultant on chemical and biological weapons arms control based in France, argued that “chemical and biological terrorism are threats that the international community must address. 

“States need to strengthen their capacity to prevent, prohibit, detain, prosecute and punish such acts, and closer international collaboration and co-ordination is essential.”

The chairman of the 2018 meeting of states parties to the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC), Ljupco Jivan Gjorgjinski, of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia wrote to BWC members, which include Russia and Britain, on February 21 this year stating: “The BWC is a normative milestone, the first multilateral disarmament treaty that bans a whole category of weapons. We must, thus, be careful not to unravel previous collective accomplishments.” 

On March 6 2018, two days after the Salisbury poisoning incident, Foreign Office Minister Sir Alan Duncan made a written statement to Parliament, on the outcome of the latest annual meeting of state parties to the BWC, reporting to MPs that, “at December’s meeting … the UK, with the US and Russia, the two other depositary governments for the convention, worked with many other states throughout 2017 to build consensus around common elements of such a substantive new work programme.”

So, we seem to be in a bizarre situation in which two of the three depositary states of the very multilateral convention that bans toxin weapons are moving towards a serious diplomatic dispute in which one, Britain, accusers another, Russia, of using these very weapons on its territory.

Dr David Lowry is senior research fellow at the Institute for Resource and Security Studies, Cambridge.