The final draft of the resolution, obtained by The Associated Press, asks the U.N. secretary-general, in coordination with the OPCW director-general, to submit to the council within 20 days recommendations to establish an “OPCW-United Nations Joint Investigative Mechanism”.
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Kerry said he and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov agreed on supporting the measure when they met in Kuala Lumpur on the sidelines of an Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) meeting. None of the 13 other council members raised objections.
“Pointing a finger matters”, U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power said after the vote, hailing the resolution’s passage as a major advance in the world body’s effort to stop the use of chemicals as weapons.
The council adopted another resolution in March, strongly condemning the use of any toxic chemical, such as chlorine, as a weapon in Syria and calling for those who use such weapons to be held accountable.
Following a chemical weapon attack on a Damascus suburb that killed hundreds of civilians on August. 21, 2013 a U.S.-Russian agreement led to a Security Council resolution the following month ordering the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons, precursors and the equipment to produce the deadly agents. But neither the organization nor the United Nations has a mandate to determine responsibility.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is investigating alleged chlorine gas attacks in Syria, but its mandate does not include investigating who carried out the attacks.
The United States has presented a draft resolution to the 15-member UN Security Council that calls for it to set up a taskforce to “identify to the greatest extent feasible, individuals, entities, groups, or governments” involved in the use of chemical weapons.
The U.S. sponsored an informal Security Council meeting in April for council members to hear first-hand accounts of chemical weapons attacks. What has been missing is a way to assign blame for chemical weapons attacks.
The United States and Russian Federation remain at odds over how to bring an end to the Syrian civil war because of their support for opposite sides in the conflict that, by U.N. count, has taken 250,000 lives, and made refugees of 4 million Syrians.
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We are sure that, as it did before, Damascus will provide the necessary assistance to the joint investigative mission and the OPCW mission in finding the facts of the possible use of chlorine as a chemical weapon.
