As the second to last day of the Sixth Review Conference heads into evening meetings, some aspects of the final outcome are becoming clear.  But deep disagreements over the promotion of peaceful cooperation and scientific and technological exchange remain unresolved.  These disagreements threaten to render the next inter-sessional process ineffectual.

As best as can be determined from outside, key aspects of the next inter-sessional include:

• There will be a one week meeting of experts and a one week meeting of States Parties every year from 2007 – 2010.  In preparation for the Seventh Review Conference in 2011, the meeting of States Parties will be extended to two weeks in 2010.

• The annual meetings will not be empowered to take decisions.

• Several topics may recur at every annual meeting (most likely, the meetings of States Parties): universality, national implementation, confidence building measures, scientific and technological developments, and coordination with other international bodies.  However, we are hearing that there are still debates over how and whether this will occur.  A failure to consider these topics annually would be a major blow to efforts to strengthen the BWC.

• The annual meetings will also consider one specific additional topic.  Seven topics are still under consideration (see here for my previous discussion of these topics).  These will have to be reduced to four, or some meetings will have to consider two topics, which is unlikely given that the meetings of experts will last only one week.  The seven topics are:

• Ways and means to enhance national implementation: including enforcement of national legislation and strengthening of national institutions, and cooperation between courts, police and customs
• Regional and sub-regional cooperation on BWC implementation
• National, regional and international measures to improve biosafety and biosecurity, including laboratory safety and security of pathogens and toxins
• oversight to prevent use of research and advances in science and technology for purposes prohibited by the Convention through education, awareness-raising and adoption of codes of conduct.
• Advances in science and technology relevant to the Convention, including prevention of misuse of such advances for illicit or hostile purposes as prohibited by the Convention
• Facilitation of, and removal of restrictions or limitations on, scientific and technological cooperation and exchange, including in the field of biotechnology, for peaceful purposes in pursuance of Article X
• Disease surveillance, and preparedness, response and provision of assistance in the case of alleged use of biological or toxin weapons

• There will likely be an action plan on universalization. Action plans on national implementation and peaceful cooperation remain extremely uncertain.

• There may be a small, three-person implementation support unit – but if there is no action plan on national implementation and no consideration of recurring topics, then one must wonder what the value of the support unit will be.

I fear that the final outcome hinges on whether the States Parties can reach agreement on how to address the issue of peaceful cooperation.  The content of the annual meetings, the work plan, the implementation support unit - all may ride on this outcome.

In an attempt to forge consensus, Ambassador Khan (Pakistan), the President of the Review Conference, offered a “comprehensive implementation action plan” on Tuesday that combined elements of the individual action plans on national implementation and Article X that had been proposed last week.  The BioWeapons Prevention Project reports that on Wednesday

The proposal … for a single action plan on comprehensive implementation was the subject of vigorous debate. Some States Parties have indicated that they do not wish to see so many elements relating to Article X (which relates to peaceful uses of the biological sciences) in an action plan they saw as important for dealing with problems of national implementation. Other States Parties indicated that if Article X issues were not covered they may not see the value in an action plan on national implementation. By the evening, there did not appear to be an easy path to follow to bring these two perspectives together.

Not good.  By tying the two action plans together, the final outcome may well be that there is no action plan at all (or no action plan that has real meaning).  Already the annual meetings won’t be empowered to take decisions, reducing the incentive to consider recurring topics every year.  Without a meaningful action plan, there may be even less incentive for considering recurring topics.  And without an action plan on national implementation, there will be less incentive to have an implementation support unit.

Add to this the fact that, by allowing only one week meetings of experts, the States Parties have probably constrained the number of individual topics for annual meetings to four.  This means not only that they won’t address some pressing issues, but also that some of the more substantial topics that remain, like preventing the misuse of advances in S&T, will likely be dropped.  If this worst case scenario of no action plan, no recurring topics, no implementation support unit, and few significant annual meeting topics comes to pass, the net result would be an outcome that makes little, if any progress over the last inter-sessional process.

It’s hard to see how such an outcome could be characterized as successful, whatever the diplomats and public relations spin masters say. But as far as I can tell, the U.S. and at least some NAM nations are willing to accept failure.  I hope they prove me wrong.