History was written on 29 April 1997 with the entry into force of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) – the world`s first multilateral disarmament agreement that provides for the elimination of an entire category of weapons of mass destruction within a set period of time. Before the turn of the nineteenth century, a third agreement was created. The chemical disarmament efforts of the twentieth century were rooted in the Hague Peace Conference of 1899. The parties to the 1899 Hague Convention agreed to “refrain from using projectiles whose sole purpose is the diffusion of suffocating or harmful gases”. A second Hague Convention of 1907 reiterated previous prohibitions on the use of poisoned or poisoned weapons. The first international treaty to limit the use of chemical weapons dates back to 1675, when France and Germany signed an agreement in Strasbourg banning the use of poisoned projectiles. Almost exactly 200 years later, in 1874, the next such agreement was concluded: the Brussels Convention on the Law of War and customs of war. The Brussels Convention prohibited the use of poisoned or poisoned weapons and the use of weapons, projectiles or materials to cause unnecessary suffering, although the agreement never entered into force. The first international agreement to limit the use of chemical weapons, in this case poisoned projectiles. But in what appears to be the first such attempt to control the use of chemical weapons, the 1675 Strasbourg Convention prohibits the use of poisoned bullets between two European rivals often at war. Negotiations on the Chemical Weapons Convention took much longer and progressed in fits and starts, as breakthroughs were accompanied by political and other changes. In 1980, the Conference on Disarmament established an ad hoc working group on chemical weapons.
Four years later, the group was tasked with determining what a ban on chemical weapons would entail, and so the preliminary and annually updated “rolling text” of the convention was created. The improvement of relations between the superpowers in the late 1980s, the chemical attack on Halabja in Iraq in 1988, the publicity of the threat of chemical warfare during the Gulf War and the announcement of a bilateral agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union to destroy most of their CW stockpiles and renounce CW production, gave a boost to the negotiations on the Convention. Although toxic chemicals have been used as tools of war for thousands of years, with the use of techniques such as poison arrows, arsenic smoke or harmful fumes, their use has long been stigmatized by an association with unnecessary cruelty and unfair play, a little below the norms of “civilized” struggle. For this reason, international efforts to ban chemical weapons have played a leading role in many long-standing disarmament treaties. To go beyond the treaty of 1675, bullets did not travel as fast as they do today before the invention of smokeless powder in 1884 and adequate gas tightness years earlier. Before these inventions, bullets went slowly enough to be made of pure lead and not a sheathed bullet without melting and dirtying the rifle or barrel of a firearm. “This deployment set a precedent for the use of poisoned projectiles against enemies and also led to the first attempt to ban the use of chemical weapons,” Coleman wrote. This was developed in the Strasbourg Convention (August 27, 1675), a franco-German bilateral agreement that ordered neither side to use poisoned projectiles, and as such constitutes the first international treaty in modern history prohibiting the use of such weapons. In the meantime, the Governing Council and the Technical Secretariat have begun to carry out their respective tasks. The Council held seven meetings in 1997 at which it considered and approved the transitional arrangements for the review of chemical weapons destruction facilities (CWDFs) and the factory agreements for chemical production plants producing chemicals with potential weapons applications listed in Annex 1 to the Chemical Weapons Convention. The first international treaty to limit the use of chemical weapons dates back to 1675, when France and Germany signed an agreement in Strasbourg banning the use of poisoned projectiles.
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