Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
tent. Noncompliance with BWC obligations (see Chapters 6, 8, and 9) has
made it difficult to claim consistency of state practice as evidence for a
customary norm.
Outstanding Issues
Geneva Protocol
The Geneva Protocol is notoriously imprecise; but its problems over inex-
act correspondence of terms in the adjectives (other/
similaires
) applied to
gases/
gaz
in the two equally authentic languages only ever affected the
CW prohibition.
But what of the difference between “bacteriological” and “biological”?
Did “bacteriological methods of warfare” encompass methods that relied
on viruses (which in 1925 were only just coming to be classified as a sep-
arate class of microorganism, rather than as very small bacteria) and
other nonbacterial microorganisms?
In 1968 the UK professed to see in the supposed narrowness of “bac-
teriological” one of the reasons why a new instrument, strengthening
the Geneva Protocol prohibition, was needed. Otherwise the deliberate
spreading of viral or other nonbacterial infections might escape prohi-
bition.
11
But other authorities were unimpressed by this apprehension.
They found no loophole. They preferred to see the Protocol as applying to
all “microbial and other biological agents” of warfare “which are in-
tended to cause disease or death in man, animals or plants,” and R. R.
Baxter and Thomas Buergenthal noted that this interpretation had US
government support.
12
George Bunn concluded from the negotiating his-
tory that “there ...isnojustification for limiting the scope of the ban on
'bacteriological warfare' because some new diseases have been discov-
ered since 1925 which we do not classify as bacteriological.”
13
This view
was widely accepted. It was bolstered by evidence that the negotiators at
Geneva in 1925 had used the two adjectives interchangeably. It was from
the Military Committee of the 1925 conference which recommended
“the prohibition of chemical and
biological
warfare” (emphasis added)
that the “Polish addendum” prohibiting
bacteriological
methods of warfare
was derived.
14
Accordingly, Boserup could write in 1972: “Even though in its strict
Search WWH ::
Custom Search