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States Agree to Pursue Bio Codes of Conduct
Michael Nguyen
In an effort to address the threat potential of emerging biotechnologies, states-parties to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) agreed at their December meeting to encourage voluntary codes of conduct for scientists. But details of the codes were left for the scientists to work out.
Eighty-seven states-parties gathered in Geneva Dec. 5-9 to build on the work of a June 2005 experts meeting. (See ACT, September 2005.) Based on those discussions, the meeting’s chairman, British Ambassador John Freeman, proposed a series of recommendations. The final report adopted in December, however, scales back Freeman’s proposal: it has less detail and no longer includes a specific encouragement to states-parties actively to implement codes. The final report suggests that codes be “voluntarily adopted” by scientists and complement measures taken by the state-parties themselves, “including national legislation.”
Many states-parties, particularly developing countries, argued that “there should be less detail in a consensus document,” said Richard Lennane, spokesperson for the Meeting of States Parties. “The report was not meant to impose any specific details on the states-parties, only to suggest guiding principles,” he said.
Codes of conduct should be developed at a national level to reflect “different levels of economic and scientific development and different management systems among countries,” said Hu Xiaodi, the head of China’s delegation to the meeting, in a Dec. 7 interview with Xinhua News Agency.
However, the wide array of fields relevant to the BWC, including genetic engineering, microbiology, and zoology, complicates the adoption of codes of conduct by scientists. Each field has several national and international professional societies and unions. In comparison, the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has been able to work closely with the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemists to increase awareness of its principles.
Many states-parties have looked to the work of the Inter-Academy Panel (IAP), a network of national science academies, as a first step toward developing codes. Noting that it was not a comprehensive list, the IAP released a “Statement on Biosecurity” Dec. 1 outlining five principles for codes of conduct. By the beginning of the Meeting of States Parties, 68 national academies had already signed the statement, and an annex to the meeting’s final report included several of the principles outlined in the IAP statement.
The meeting, the last before the treaty’s Sixth Review Conference in late 2006, concludes a work program focused primarily on strengthening the BWC through national measures. States-parties adopted the work program following the collapse of the Fifth Review Conference in 2001. (See ACT, December 2002.) One U.S. State Department official told Arms Control Today that, although the meetings have been useful in encouraging discussion among national experts, a decision has not been made yet on whether to back a new series of meetings following the upcoming conference. Under the BWC, which entered into force in 1975, review conferences are held every five years.
A preparatory committee will meet April 26-28 to draft an agenda for the conference. Ambassador Masood Khan of Pakistan is expected to chair the committee. He is also expected to be named president of the review conference but will not assume official duties until the beginning of the preparatory committee meeting. The review conference will take place sometime between Nov. 20 and Dec. 6, although the precise dates and length will be set by the preparatory committee.