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Please vote For, Against, Abstain, or Present.
IMPORTANT NOTE: If you change your vote, please do not edit your post to reflect this. Please post again clearly stating you are changing your vote. This is to ensure your updated vote is counted.
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Ministry of WA Affairs Official Review
by Minister Sanctarian WA Mission
This is a strong global disarmament proposal which seeks to ban the use of chemical agents as weapons, and to further reduce the threat of chemical weapons falling into the hands of rogue states or terrorist groups.
This resolution begins by stating a difference between chemical weapons and riot control agents. This distinction is important as, in the next part, all use of chemical weapons is banned by the resolution. WA states are then required to dismantle chemical weapons programs and neutralise all existing weapons.
The aforementioned distinction becomes important in the next part as the resolution does allow for riot control weapons, which is deems different to chemical weapons, to be permitted. The resolution also allows for chemical agents to be stockpiled, so long as they are in compliance with this resolution, i.e. not weaponised.
This is where the resolution falls down a little. It forbids nations from producing, selling, or transferring chemical weapons to a third party, likely to cut down on chemical terrorism by non-state actors or rogue states themselves. However, while weapons are forbidden from being sold, it does not stop the chemical agents themselves from being sold to terrorist groups, along with instructions on how to weaponise. In other words, if a nation sold chemical agents to a non state actor and told them how to weaponise them, they would not be in violation of this act, as the act only forbids the sale or transfer or the weapons themselves.
In theory this one little loophole shouldn't really be that big a deal, but practically it would allow the continued sale of, in effect, chemical weapons on the black market allowing terrorist, or other unsavoury groups, to continue using them against people, and the nation in question would not be forbidden from doing this.
The resolution also establishes a new commission, the WACWC, that is to work with nations in helping them to further understand, protect, and deal with chemical weapons. This committee itself seems to be fairly straightforward and I have no problem with it, even if the duties could have been transferred to an already existing committee.
Overall, I find it very hard to come up with any one position on this resolution. There is nothing fundamentally bad about it, but the loophole I mentioned earlier is to me slightly unsettling. I'm also annoyed that the definition seems to be copy-pasted from whatever dictionary the author had laying around. More could have been done to make this clearer.
I myself will be voting present, i.e. personally abstaining from the vote, for the reasons given. Since I can't come to a decision on this myself, I feel it would be inappropriate for the Ministry to recommend TNP citizens to vote a certain way. If you feel the Delegate should abstain on the matter, the correct vote to lodge would be "abstain". If you yourself are abstaining, please for "present".
