Can everyone help verify the bioweapons convention? Perhaps, via open source monitoring
By Gunnar Jeremias, Mirko Himmel | November 1, 2016
The Biological Weapons Convention is the only multilateral treaty to ban an entire class of weapons of mass destruction, and it officially acknowledges no offensive bioweapons programs or stockpiles anywhere in the world. However, it also has no verification mechanism, relying instead on voluntary reporting from its 175 members, only about 40% of which participate. (Of those, only some 30 nations make their reporting public.) It might therefore be worth exploring alternative means of building transparency and confidence, specifically through the collection and analysis of information about compliance from the wide variety of public sources available right now to anyone with an Internet connection. Efforts to responsibly sort and analyze this information, and to use it to develop productive questions for the convention and its members, will admittedly require some expertise, but it is certainly available as well.
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Gunnar Jeremias
Gunnar Jeremias is the head of the Research Group for Biological Arms Control at the University of Hamburg’s Centre for Science and... Read More
Mirko Himmel
Mirko Himmel is a biochemist working at the Research Group for Biological Arms Control at the University of Hamburg’s Centre of... Read More
