Today the Committee of the Whole meets again, this time spending the morning on:

“implementation of the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention relating to economic and technological development”

and the afternoon talking about:

“implementation of the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention relating to Articles XII to XV and final clauses.”

It appears that today’s negotiations continued into the evening. Richard Guthrie who still is in The Hague at the Conference sent this informal update on the rather slow progress the Commitee of the Whole has been making.

“This is an informal update and the outline provided here will be filled in with more details tomorrow in the regular report.

After a mammoth effort, the paragraph-by-paragraph read through of the ‘informal text’ was completed Monday night.

The consultations finished at 8.40pm local time with a new version of ‘CRP.1’ that now contains 40 pages of draft declaration compared with 29 just prior to the opening of the Review Conference.

There are many, many instances of bracketed text and highlighted text indicating further discussion may be needed and most paragraphs contain at least one bracket or one highlight.

It is not clear what procedure will be carried out tomorrow for the ‘second reading’ of the text. This will probably be decided at the General Committee meeting that is scheduled for 9.30 Tuesday morning.”