Diplomats: No objections to Syria chemical weapons text

The United Nations Security Council is expected to vote Friday on a measure drafted by top U.S. and Russian diplomats that would identify and hold accountable those who use chemical weapons in Syria’s protracted civil war. However neither the group nor the United Nations has a mandate to find out duty. Russia, like the United States, wields a UN Security Council veto.

Kerry made the announcement Thursday in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, shortly after meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on the sidelines of a Southeast Asian regional summit.

The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the global chemical weapons watchdog, has a mandate to carry out fact-finding missions to determine whether chemical attacks occurred in Syria.

Pressure has been mounting on the deeply-divided Security Council to take action in Syria, where the war is now in its fifth year and has claimed more than 230,000 lives.

The draft resolution requests UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon to make recommendations within 20 days for establishing and operating an OPCW-UN joint investigative mechanism.

White House spokesman Josh Earnest said that while Washington and Moscow collaborated to successfully remove Syria’s declared chemical weapons stockpile, “there are ongoing concerns”.

New Zealand’s United Nations Ambassador Gerard van Bohemen, a council member, said the resolution “will at least go some distance towards satisfying those who are concerned about the apparent impunity of people being able to use these weapons”.

Earlier this year, council members heard graphic accounts from Syrian doctors of chlorine gas attacks in March on the village of Sarmin that left six dead including three children.

“How effective it will be, we’ll have to wait and see”, he said.

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.

That team would “identify to the greatest extent feasible individuals, entities, groups, or governments who were perpetrators, organizers, sponsors or otherwise involved in the use of chemicals as weapons, including chlorine or any other toxic chemical, in the Syrian Arab Republic”. Syria’s declared stockpile of 1,300 metric tons of chemical compounds has been destroyed, however the OPCW is investigating attainable undeclared chemical weapons.

Assad has strongly denied using chemical weapons, instead blaming such attacks on rebels fighting to overthrow his government.