Legal aspects of national implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention transfer provisions

The author discusses legal aspects of implementing the Chemical Weapons Convention's (CWC's) export and import provisions. These implementing measures are universal, applying not only to the few States Parties that will declare and destroy chemical weapons, but also to the many States Parties that have never had a chemical weapons program. This new need for national measures to implement multilateral arms control agreements has generated unease due to a perception that implementation may be burdensome and at odds with national law. In 1993, concerns arose that the complexity of integrating the treaty with national law would cause each nation to effectuate the Convention without regard to what other nations were doing, thereby engendering significant disparities in implementation steps among States Parties. As a result, the author and his colleagues prepared the Manual for National Implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention. The Manual tries to increase understanding of the Convention by identifying its obligations and suggesting methods of meeting them. Here the author discusses progress among several States in actually developing implementing measures for the Convention's transfer requirements. CWC legislation from australia, Germany, Norway, South Africa, and Sweden were available at this writing in English through the Provisional Technical Secretariat. Of course, it is important to note that this brief survey necessarily omitted examination of the existing background of other, related domestic laws that these signatories might also have adopted that affect CWC implementation