On Monday, External affairs minister S. Jaishankar made a stark warning that a non-state use of biological weapons is not a distant possibility as it was in the past but the real and new international threat. In a speech at a conference celebrating 50 years of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), he emphasised the necessity to modernise the treaty by noting that it has yet to have the necessary mechanisms of compliance, verification and control of new scientific developments.
Jaishankar once again urged India on the need to be much stricter on compliance with some form of verification mechanism befitting the current technology. He stressed the importance of regular and systemic evaluations of scientific and technological advancement and that governance structures should keep up with innovation, particularly on sensitive and dual-use biological research.
Putting stress on the fact that India is committed to international non-proliferation activities, he said that India possesses a strong legal and regulatory framework to implement the UN Security Council Resolution 1540 aimed at the prevention of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the regulation of strategic trade.
Jaishankar not only warned that bioterrorism was no longer in the realm of imagination, but also in a bid to show that the BWC has yet to establish a permanent technical body, an effective system to enforce compliance, or even a system to monitor the ever-changing field of biological research. Such institutional loopholes, he opined, should be now urgently discussed in order to develop global confidence and enhance preparedness within collective unity.
This, he added, has been proposed by India in a National Implementation Framework which covers the identification of high risk biological agents, the management of dual use research, domestic reporting, incident management and continuous training. India also partially contributes to quick, humanitarian aid in biological disasters.
Clearly, looking back at the 50-year history of the BWC, Jaishankar remarked that the world had to reiterate the central idea that humanity denies the disease as a weapon. To implement this principle, countries need to modernise the Convention and reinforce the scientific governance and increase global biosecurity capacities, especially to the Global South.
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