The commemorative event for the 50th anniversary of the entry into force of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) was held today in Geneva. The event – opened by UN Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Ms. Izumi Nakamitsu, and supported by the European Union – was attended by diplomats and experts from the world of civil society and research.
On the Italian side, Ambassador Bencini, Permanent Representative of Italy to the Conference on Disarmament, who also served as President of the last BWC Review Conference, held at the end of 2022 and concluded with an agreed final document, took part in the commemorative event. In his statement, Ambassador Bencini listed several lessons learnt from the Review Conference, including the need to pragmatically pursue an outcome even against the backdrop of a difficult international context and marked differences in positions.
The main outcome of the Review Conference, which the UN Secretary-General Guterres described as a “glimmer of hope” against the backdrop of a particularly bleak international environment, was the end of the twenty-year-old negotiating deadlock on strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention through the establishment of an Ad Hoc Working Group. “The progress we have made in these two years has been significant,” Ambassador Bencini commented, “and the idea of a Special Conference in 2025 is now widely supported”.
The BWC is one of the three major conventions on weapons of mass destruction, together with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention. It entered into force in March 1975 and is the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. The Convention, which has been ratified by almost all UN member states, has helped to prevent the massive use of biological weapons over the past fifty years.
To coincide with the 50th anniversary and commemorative event, UNODA presented a publication – The Biological Weapons Convention at Fifty. Codifying 100 years of efforts to combat biological warfare – with a collection of articles structured along the lines of panels on the Convention’s past, present and future. It is a concise text but offers a timely overview of the BWC and the challenges of biological warfare. The publication, which contains an article by me entitled How will the Ninth Review Conference be remembered and what impact has it had on future meetings under the BWC?, can be downloaded as a pdf at this link.
The statement is available at the following link.
