The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) held the Sixth Annual Assistance Coordination Workshop from 4 to 7 November 2002 in Geneva, Switzerland. Seventy-three participants from thirty-six Member States, the Technical Secretariat and three international organisations participated in this four-day workshop.
Representatives of Member States reviewed the OPCW’s implementation of Article X in the current year and discussed the plans for 2003. Article X stipulates that States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) are obligated to provide assistance and protection should any requesting State Party perceive a threat of chemical attack, or actually be attacked with chemical weapons. The workshop also clarified the forms of assistance States Parties have offered in the case of need. The swift and effective coordination of these individual offers was also discussed.
In his opening address, Mr Bernard Jeanty, the representative of the government of Switzerland, underlined the commitment of the Swiss government to the implementation of Article X by providing annual protection and emergency laboratory courses in Spiez, Switzerland (CITPRO and SEF-LAB courses), offering 10,000 units of individual protective equipment to the OPCW and its participation at the first OPCW exercise on the delivery of assistance, ( ASSISTEX 1) in Croatia (10 to 14 September 2002).
Mr Jeanty noted that this annual assistance coordination workshop, held in Geneva, served to bring together several international organizations, mandated with the delivery of assistance and to familiarize them with the OPCW’s assistance and protection programmes and activities.
ASSISTEX, the recently completed OPCW exercise, dealing with the delivery of assistance, following a terrorist use of chemical weapons, was evaluated and analyzed by the workshop’s participants. Member State representatives, who had participated in ASSISTEX, briefed the workshop on the lessons learned.
Representatives of the World Health Organisation (WHO), the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA) and the World Food Programme (WFP) also made presentations on how these organisations can cooperate with each other in the provision of assistance, underlying that it is only OPCW which has a capacity to respond to a chemical weapons attack.
Workshop participants observed a one-day Swiss exercise, CAPITO 02, involving a simulated terrorist attack using nerve agents. The exercise included emergency first responders from the Canton of Geneva and the Defence Department’s intervention group.
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