As erratic and lawless as war may seem, there is absurdly a need to govern the legal use of force in armed conflicts. Leo Tolstoy once said that: ”War is so unjust and ugly that all who wage it must try to stifle the voice of conscience within themselves.” And while an individual’s recognition of culpability and sense of morality indeed play an important role when one commits wrongdoings, this rarely amounts to actual progress on the larger, global scale, underlining the importance of legal regulation.
Whilst there are numerous forms of warfare known to man, stemming from the times of primitive societies, the modern laws of war strive to regulate the conditions of armed conflicts. Article 22 of the Regulations Annexed to the Hague Convention of 1907 stipulates that “the right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited.” One of the issues the law of war deals with is the prohibition of certain weapons that may cause unnecessary suffering, encompassing the prohibition of chemical weapons.
After witnessing the terrors of the use of chemical agents in World War I, the global public was horrified by the consequences of the use of chemicals in warfare. Chemical weapons like chlorine, phosgene and mustard gas claimed lives by inflicting severe injuries, causing agonizing suffering to the victims and leading to the deaths of 100 000 people. The global outrage resulted in the prohibition of the use of chemical weapons, laid down in the 1925 Geneva Protocol.
However, since WWI, more than 1 million lives have been lost by the use of chemical weapons. From the use of the notorious Zyklon B on civilians in Nazi Germany to the use of Agent Orange by the US military in the Vietnamese War, the Geneva Protocol has been defied repeatedly throughout history, which called for the necessary reinforcement of the ban.
On April 29, 1997, the world’s first multilateral disarmament agreement, striving to eliminate an entire category of mass destruction weapons, came into force after 12 years of negotiations. This agreement is the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which currently counts 193 parties.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was established with the Convention’s entry-into-force and has taken the role of a legal platform. Their mission is to ensure the implementation of the CWC’s provisions and ensuring that a credible, transparent regime for the disarmament from chemical weapons is in place.
Even though there is visible progress since the reinforcement of the prohibition, as parties to the treaty have destroyed or are in the process of destroying the chemical weapons in their possession, the use of these weapons of mass destruction still has not been completely eradicated. One of the most recent events took place in April 2017, when at least 89 people were killed, including 33 children, and injuring more than 541, making the second deadliest attack by chemical weapons since the 2013 attack in Ghouta, which, as estimated, claimed between 281 to 1729 lives.
Serious efforts of chemical disarmament prove that the global society is very much aware of the seriousness of the disastrous suffering and consequences that chemical warfare brings. In addition, promoting the goals of peace, security and multilateralism, informing and educating people on this issue must persist in order to achieve a future without the threat of chemical warfare.
In the 20th Session of the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention Conference, November 30th was proclaimed a memorial Day of Remembrance for all Victims of Chemical Warfare.
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