Baladi - Newspapers
The Syrian regime which has been accused of using chemical weapons, barrel bombs and torture against its own people during a seven-year civil war, is now the president of the of the United Nations-backed Conference on Disarmament.
The move was met with outrage from Western governments, but there was little they could do to prevent Syria from taking over the world’s only permanent multilateral body for negotiating arms control agreements for four weeks.
The leadership structure was set up to prevent major powers dominating the forum, and with Syria following Switzerland in the alphabetical list of member states, the path was cleared for what the United States ambassador to the conference, Robert Wood, condemned as “one of the darkest days” in the forum’s history.
The conference was created in 1979, and one of the most significant treaties it negotiated was the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, which bans the production, stockpiling or use of chemical weapons.
Syria formally submitted to the convention in September 2013, less than a month after a sarin attack in Ghouta killed 1,400 people.
The United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, unveiling an agenda for disarmament in Geneva last week, acknowledged that he could do nothing to change Syria’s presidency of the conference.
The group is not a United Nations body, though it meets at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, but he expressed the hope it would not harm the group’s disarmament efforts.
Source: The New York Times