IN THE sort of movie where global agencies are attacked by arch-villains with superpowers, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) would make a perfect target. Its concrete and glass headquarters sits amid a cluster of high-minded international institutions in The Hague, down the street from the tribunal where Yugoslavia’s war criminals were tried and not far from the International Court of Justice. The OPCW has been busy over the past decade, destroying chemical-weapons stockpiles in Libya, Iraq and Syria, for which it won the Nobel peace prize in 2013. But the use of a nerve agent in the attempted assassination of a Russian ex-spy in Britain this month has dragged it into tricky waters.
The mission of the OPCW is to support the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993, which bars countries from possessing them. (Using them has been illegal since The Hague Conventions of 1899, signed just across town—though that did not stop Germany and Britain from gassing each other’s troops during the first world war.) But the OPCW is...Continue reading
from Europe https://ift.tt/2HZlirQ
via https://ifttt.com/ IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment