The Biological Weapons Convention and the need for a Compliance and Verification mechanism

The GCSP’s Head of Arms Control and Disarmament speaks to three experts on biological security from King’s College London about the start of discussions by the States Parties to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) on compliance and verification. They discuss why a compliance and verification mechanism is needed, what can be learned from the previous verification efforts in other contexts, and what has changed in how verification is done since this was last discussed in the BWC framework over 20 years ago. The experts also discuss what the key elements of any mechanism will need to be, what are the most important bio security incidents, and how countries are working on their preparedness to respond to such incidents. The GCSP will be following the discussions in the BWC closely and stands ready to be a platform to bring together all stakeholders to generate new thinking to strengthen the BWC to respond to today’s bio security challenges.