Legal aspects of national implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention national authority provisions. Workshop I: The National Authority

摘要

This seminar is an excellent opportunity for all attendees to learn from each other about how the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) can become a foundation of arms control in Africa and around the world. The author discusses legal aspects of implementing the CWC's national authority provisions. These implementing measures are universal, applying not only to the few States Parties that will declare and destroy chemical weapons, but also to the many States Parties that have never had a chemical weapons programme. This new need for national measures to implement multilateral arms control agreements has generated unease due to a perception that implementation may be burdensome and at odds with national law. In 1993, concerns arose that the complexity of integrating the treaty with national law would cause each nation to effectuate the Convention without regard to what other nations were doing, thereby engendering significant disparities in implementation steps among States Parties. As a result, the author prepared the Manual for National Implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention late last year and presented it to each national delegation at the December 1993 meeting of the Preparatory Commission in The Hague. Here the author discusses progress among several States in actually developing implementing measures for the Convention's national authority requirements. CWC legislation from Australia, Germany, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden were available at this writing in English through the PTS. Of course, it is important to note that this brief survey necessarily omitted examination of the existing (open quotes)background(close quotes) of other, related domestic laws that these signatories might also have adopted that affect CWC implementation. The author hopes that his brief review will give delegations a flavor of the choices that exist for national implementation of the CWC.