An event was held today in Geneva to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the entry into force of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC). The event - opened by UN Deputy Secretary General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs, Izumi Nakamitsu, and supported by the European Union - was attended by diplomats and experts from the world of civil society and research.
On the Italian side, the commemorative event was attended by Ambassador Leonardo Bencini, Permanent Representative to the Conference on Disarmament Affairs, who also chaired the last BWC Review Conference, held at the end of 2022 and concluded with a shared final document. In his speech, Ambassador Bencini listed a number of lessons learned from the Review Conference, including the need to pragmatically pursue an outcome even against the backdrop of a difficult international environment and marked differences in positions.
The main outcome of the Review Conference, which UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres described as a 'glimmer of hope' against the backdrop of a particularly bleak international reality, was the unblocking of negotiations that had been at a standstill for over twenty years on the strengthening of the Biological Weapons Convention through the establishment of an ad hoc Working Group. "The progress made in these two years has been significant," Ambassador Bencini commented, "and the idea of a Special Conference in 2025 to formalise them is now widely supported."
The BWC is one of the three major weapons of mass destruction conventions, along with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the Chemical Weapons Convention. It entered into force in March 1975 and is the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire category of weapons of mass destruction. The Convention, which has been ratified by almost all UN member states, has helped prevent the massive use of biological weapons over the past fifty years.
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