Negotiations on a Chemical Weapons Ban

Abstract

The efforts to get rid of chemical weapons have gone on now for more than a century. The Brussels declarations in 1874 were the first to ask expressly for a prohibition on the use of poison as a weapon. In 1925 the so-called Geneva Protocol appeared, which prohibits the use of chemical and biological weapons. Negotiations have now been going on for more than fifteen years, to prohibit the development, production and stockpiling of chemical weapons and to prescribe for the destruction of existing stocks.