No Impunity for Chemical Warfare

Not too long ago, it seemed that che­mical war­fare was a thing of the past. In re­cent years, how­ever, the world has been troubled by news of state and non-state actors’ use of chemical weapons in Syria, with the reported attack in Douma on 7 April 2018 being only the latest in a long series of similar accounts. Such use poses a chal­lenge to the uni­versal chemical weapons pro­hi­bition as long as the inter­national community is unable to agree on a unified and deter­mined response and to find ways of holding the per­pe­trators to account. This situation must be over­come if chemical warfare is to be consigned to history for good.