UK shift in chemical weapons policy questioned

Britain must clarify its attitude on the use of chemical weapons for law enforcement, before an international meeting next year to review the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention, the Royal Society has told the government.

The society, Britain’s national academy of science, says the UK position when the convention was being negotiated in the early 1990s was that riot control agents were the only toxic chemicals permissible for law enforcement purposes.

But, in a report on neuroscience, conflict and security, the society calls on the government to “publish a statement on the reasons for its apparent recent shift in position”.

It detects a recent move toward a less restrictive UK interpretation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, with an acceptance that “incapacitating chemical agents” would also be in compliance with the convention “as long as they were in types and quantities consistent with” law enforcement.

Pharmaceutical research and development over the last few years has led to a new range of chemicals that can incapacitate people by affecting their brain activity.

“The trouble is that it is impossible to make a safe incapacitating agent and delivery system,” said Rod Flower, professor of biochemical pharmacology at Queen Mary, University of London, who chaired the Royal Society’s report.

The hazards were illustrated in October 2002 when Russian special forces pumped incapacitants, apparently based on the opiate drug fentanyl, into Moscow’s Dubrovka theatre where Chechen separatists held 800 hostages. Though it ended the siege, 129 hostages died and many more suffered long-term injury.

“It is absolutely crucial that countries address the definition of incapacitating chemical agents under the Chemical Weapons Convention at the next review conference in 2013,” said Prof Flower.