Event and Conference Summaries
CWC Coalition Side Events
Summary Report
29th Conference of States Parties
The 29th Conference of States Parties took place in The Hague from 24 – 28 November 2024. For all information for civil society, please see our resources page.
CSP-29 marked a major step for civil society engagement with the OPCW. The ambassadors of Costa Rica and Germany released a report on 22 November 2024, just ahead of CSP-29, in which they outline their consultations with civil society. The report begins with a reflection on the 5th Review Conference (May 2023), outlines past and present interactions between civil society and the OPCW, notes the relevant actors (youth, national authorities), notes the ongoing challenge that the accreditation process poses to some NGOs, and ends with recommendations. Read the full report here.
CWC Coalition Side Events
Future of the CWC Workshops: Recommendations from Civil Society for the Next Five Years
On Monday afternoon, the CWC Coalition hosted a side event on the workshops we organized in summer 2024 on civil society recommendations for the next five years. The workshops consisted of a selection of six topics that present ongoing challenges to the CWC and we enlisted the help of six experts in the field to write input papers providing background on the topics and recommendations as a starting point for a discussion with our civil society experts. For our side event we were joined by Alexander Kelle of CBWNet and Stefano Costanzi of American University who presented about chemical terrorism and verification and inspections respectively.
Humanitarian Impacts of Chemical Weapons
On Thursday afternoon, Anfal Stories, an NGO based in Iraqi Kurdistan, hosted a side event. Members of several Iraqi Kurdish NGOs presented a short documentary, “Goptapa”, about the story of the town by that name in Iraq which was gassed by Saddam Hussein during his Anfal campaign in the late 1980s. It recounts the story of victims of the gas attack and the survivors and their descendants today, highlighting the intergenerational trauma of chemical weapons attacks.