... the right to determine responsibility for the use of chemical weapons, which was adopted in late June 2018 at the initiative of Western countries. A total of 82 member nations voted for the decision, as opposed to the coalition of 24 countries led by Russia, Syria and Iran.
All the parties involved eagerly awaited the results of the OPCW’s Fact-Finding Mission (FFM) in Syria, which began its investigative work in Douma five days after the alleged attack. However, what the FFM released on July 6, 2018 was merely an
interim report
. This means that a final report has yet to be published....
... casted three
vetoes in a row to put an end to the OPCW-UN mechanism that Russia had
initiated together with the United States.
This article is a
contribution to the analysis of 7
th
JIM report in an effort to
understand how reasonable or groundless the Russian accusations of JIM’s work
are.
Background
There were two
international bodies with regard to alleged use of chemical weapons on the
territory of Syria:
— Fact-Finding
Mission (hereinafter “FFM”), established on the basis of the OPCW authority
under the Chemical Weapons Convention (hereinafter “Convention”) on 29 April
2014;
— OPCW-UN Joint Investigative Mechanism (hereinafter “JIM”),
established by the Security Council resolution 2235 (2015) on 7 August 2015.
The FFM ...