At the session of the Organization for Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) held on November 20, India voted for Russian-Chinese proposal on Syria. However, the proposal was then rejected.
Addressing 23rd session of the conference of the state parties to OPCW, India favored the proposal of developing a team who would work on the proposal regarding the implementation of the decision on an attribute mechanism on the usage of chemical weapons in Syria. The mechanism could blame the attacks that uses banned chemicals.
India at the same time declined the proposal of the overall budget of OPCW with a saying that despite the absence of agreement on the attribution mechanism, India was in favor because of its continued support for the OPCW.
Ambassador Venu Rajamony, permanent representative of India to OPCW, stated that India extends its full support to the effective and non-discriminatory implementation idea of OPCW and does respect and attaches high importance to the chemical weapons convention.
He also said that India is supporting OPCW because it believes on setting up an operational team to help to rebuild consensus and on overcoming the divisions over attribution mechanism.
However, earlier India had declined the proposal and voted against the decision of setting up an attribution mechanism because it had earlier impacted the cooperative structure, which had brought together such policy-making organs and a technical secretariat invited and headed by the Director-General.
Speaking on the Programme and Budget for 2019, Rajamony said India has and is always committed to supporting the OPCW, in their tasks invested upon it by the agreements as well as processing it by providing necessary funds.
Because it knew that all parties will extend their support to the “zero nominal growth” budget, India has supported Iran’s proposed amendments to the budget proposal, even also because states parties seeks forward on the attribution mechanism.
State parties has voted 82 votes against and 30 in favour out of 112 in the Russian-Chinese proposal and the programme and budget for OPCW was adopted with the votes 99 in favour and 27 in against out of 126 states parties votes.