Pakistan to head UN panel on biological weapons

GENEVA—Ambassador Masood Khan, Pakistan’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, was elected President of the 6th Review Conference of Biological Weapons.
The five-yearly conference started here Monday. Kofi Annan, UN Secretary General, who had travelled to Geneva to inaugurate the conference, congratulated the Pakistani Ambassador expressing the hope that states parties meeting for the next three weeks would made progress in the area of security and disarmament relating to biological weapons.
This is the first time that Pakistan has been elected as the President of a review conference of the three key treaties dealing with global security and disarmament issues. The other two are the Non-Proliferation Treaty and Chemical Weapons Convention. Pakistan is not a member of the NPT.
Masood Khan, in his statement after the election, warned: “Biological weapons are a real, potent threat to humanity. They are weapons of mass destruction that may be as deadly as nuclear weapons or even deadlier”. He said that the rapid advances in the life sciences had increased the danger of abuse of the breakthroughs in human genome and DNA. “Cures for Alzheimer’s of diabetes could be misused to make biological weapons”, he said. In Geneva, 155 states parties are meeting to strengthen barriers against biological weapons. The Biological Weapons Convention is considered to be a success story. Over the past three decades, stockpiles have been destroyed and the incidence of the use of biological weapons has been low.
But Masood Khan, the President of the review conference, cautioned that the threat of biological weapons was growing. —APP