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2 Hague Just. J. 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/hgejcejl2 and id is 1 raw text is: EDITORIAL The State of International Law in The Hague: Chemical Weapons, Genocide, and more... Harry Post On April 22, 1915 at Ypres, the first significant gas attack during World War I took place. A green-yellow cloud of chlorine gas drifted slowly towards the allied trenches and soon hundreds of soldiers were vomiting, choking and dying while some managed to flee. By 1918 the Allies had also established their chemical warfare programmes. Artillery fired shells which wounded and killed by burning skin, eyes and lungs were now widespread on the battlefields. It has been estimated that by November 1918, at the time of the Armistice, more than 550,000 people had become the victims of the by then great variety of different gases employed by both sides. Due to the large scale use of airplanes, chemical weapons had also become a very serious threat against cities and civilians. In particular, that prospect seems to have led to the adoption in 1925 of the 'Protocol on the Prohibition of the Use in War of Asphyxiating, Poisonous or Other Gases, and of Bacteriological Methods of Warfare', better known as the Geneva Gas Protocol. In the Second World War, the Allied policy of 'no first-use but retaliation-use' of chemical weapons prevented their employment. During the cold war, the development and stockpiling of new chemical weapons, such as nerve gases, as well as biological weapons increased substantially to diminish the risk of full-scale nuclear war. Accidents with stockpiles and tests of such weaponry in the sixties together with criticism of the use of herbicides by the United States during the Vietnam War, led in 1972 to the first step on the path to abandonment of such weapons: the conclusion of the Biological Weapons Convention.' It would take the fall of the Soviet Union before measures could be agreed upon to also bring the chemical arms race to a halt. In September 1992 in Geneva, the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) was signed. On 29 April 1997 the Convention entered into force and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was established with its seat in The Hague. More than 180 States are now a party to the CWC, including the USA, but several States Convention on the Prohibition of the Development, Production and Stockpiling of Bacteriological (Biological) and Toxin Weapons and on their Destruction, signed on 10 April 1972 in London, Washington, D.C. and Moscow. The Convention entered into force on 26 March 1975. HAGUE JUSTICE JOURNAL / JOURNAL JUDICIAIRE DE LA HAYE, VOL. 2, NO. 1 (2007), PP 1-4. © HAGUE JUSTICE JOURNAL /JOURNAL JUDICIAIRE DE LA HAYE 2007.

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