Syria’s UN inspectors face tight weapons deadline

The decision is the key to any UN resolution on Syria’s chemical weapons programme.

The five permanent members of the deeply divided UN Security Council reached agreement on Thursday on a resolution to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons. A vote depends on how soon the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, which is meeting later on Friday at its headquarters in The Hague, can adopt its plan for securing and destroying Syria’s stockpile.

The draft agreed upon by Russia, China, the United States, France and Britain includes two legally binding demands – that Syria abandons its chemical stockpile and allows unfettered access to the chemical weapons experts.

If Syria fails to comply, the draft says the Security Council would need to adopt a second resolution to impose possible military and other actions on Damascus under Chapter Seven of the UN charter.

Issam Khalil, a member of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s ruling Baath party, portrayed the deal as an American diplomatic failure.

“The resolution does not include threats or even possibilities of misinterpretations in a way that would let America and its allies to take advantage of it as they did in Iraq,” Khalil said in Damascus.

Nonetheless, after two and a half years of paralysis, the agreement represents a breakthrough for the Security Council and rare unity between Russia, which supports Assad’s government, and the United States, which backs the opposition.

The diplomatic push to find some agreement on Syria was triggered by an August 21 poison gas attack that killed hundreds of civilians in a Damascus suburb and President Barack Obama’s subsequent threat to use military force.

The US and Russia agree that Syria has roughly 1,000 metric tons of chemical weapons agents and precursors, including blister agents like mustard gas and nerve agents like sarin.

A group of UN inspectors already on the ground in Syria said they are probing a total of seven sites of suspected poison gas attacks, including the Damascus suburb where hundreds were killed last month. That number was raised from three sites.

The UN proposals will allow inspectors into any site suspected of chemical weapons involvement even if Syria’s government did not identify the location. That gives the inspectors unusually broad authority.

It sets a target of destroying all of Syria’s chemical weapons and equipment by the first half of 2014 and calls on Syria to “co-operate fully with all aspects of the implementation of this decision” and let the inspectors examine any location they choose.

Meanwhile, a group of international war crimes experts is calling for the creation of a war crimes court in Damascus to try top-ranking Syrian politicians and soldiers when the civil war ends.

Syria is not a party to the International Criminal Court – the war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Netherlands – so the ICC does not have jurisdiction over.