Chemical Weapons Convention Geneva negotiations

The Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production, Stockpiling and Use of Chemical Weapons and on Their Destruction, shortly described as Convention on general and comprehensive prohibition of chemical weapons, or Chemical Weapons Convention, abbreviated as CWC, was adopted in 1992 after complex negotiations on the basis of The Conference on Disarmament (and previous multilateral negotiating fora in Geneva), lasting nearly a quarter of a century mainly due to the worldwide spread of chemical industry and relatively easy... 

As a consequence, the first significant discussions of a ban on chemical weapons since the Geneva Protocol of 1925 started soon after the conclusion of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) in 1972. During negotiations at UN disarmament conferences in Geneva, exploratory initiatives by Japan (1974) and the United Kingdom (1976) were proposed for a chemical weapons ban. 

Recalling that the States parties to the Convention met at Geneva from 8 to 26 September 1986 to review the operation of the Convention with a view to assuring that the purposes of the preamble to and the provisions of the Convention, including the provisions concerning negotiations on chemical weapons, were being realized. 

Chapter 3 is concerned with the period between the two world wars. It describes the ways in which public opinion in the field of chemical warfare was aroused after the experience of the First World War, and to some extent how public opinion was then exploited. The chapter considers some of the effects of this including how it stimulated the negotiation of the 1925 Geneva Protocol, one of the most important pieces of conventional international law prohibiting the use of chemical and biological weapons. The chapter also considers the national policies and programmes relating to chemical warfare in the inter-war period and examines important chemical warfare discoveries in these decades. 

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