The European Union Parliament on Thursday urged EU governments to push for compliance with a treaty to prevent germ warfare, and joined the United Nations in calling for an immediate worldwide ban on cluster bombs.
The EU assembly made the call as countries met in Geneva to review a treaty on inhumane weapons, several days before a conference on biological and toxin weapons in the same city.
The 1975 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, signed by more than 165 countries, bans the development and stockpiling of germ-based weapons. But unlike treaties on nuclear and chemical weapons, the convention doesn’t include procedures to verify that countries are complying, because it has been considered too difficult to conduct thorough inspections.
Some countries that signed the convention, including the Soviet Union and Iraq, were later found to be developing biological weapons in what appeared to be civilian facilities.
Efforts to negotiate a monitoring agreement collapsed in 2001.
The United States State Department has described the convention as unverifiable, because biological weapons can be produced in small, inconspicuous locations.
The European Parliament said in a resolution that it was concerned that the EU had not stood up to the US, and that this was ”damaging the future of the convention and its credibility”.
The resolution is non-binding but is used as a form of political pressure on EU governments.
Earlier this month, the UN demanded an immediate moratorium on the use of cluster bombs after the international Red Cross stepped up its campaign against the unreliable and inaccurate weapons.
Cluster bomblets, which can be as small as a flashlight battery, are packed into artillery shells or bombs dropped from aircraft. A single container fired to destroy airfields or tanks and soldiers typically scatters about 200 to 600 of the mini-explosives over an area the size of a football field.
Some of the submunitions fail to explode, and can endanger civilians years after conflicts have ended.
The UN has estimated that Israel dropped as many as four million of the bomblets in southern Lebanon during the recent armed conflict there, with perhaps 40% of the submunitions failing to explode on impact.
”The European Parliament stresses the need for the international community to start negotiations without delay to establish a comprehensive and effective convention to ban cluster munitions worldwide, in the same way as it has been done for anti-personnel mines,” the resolution said. — Sapa-AP