BWC NGO Coordinator

I took on the role of NGO Coordinator for the Biological Weapons Convention in 2017.

Statements

I initiated the first joint NGO statement  which I delivered to the BWC Meeting of States Parties on 5 December 2017 on behalf of nearly 60 organisations and individuals. Listen to the delivery here:

Further statements:

My role as NGO Coordinator  builds on my long-standing engagement with the BWC through statements at BWC meetings. I have delivered statements in the NGO session at the last three Review Conferences of the BWC and at each of the biannual meetings in between. Most of these statements have been given together with my colleague Nicholas Sims (Emeritus Reader in International Relations, LSE). More recently, we have  been joined by our colleague Brian Balmer (Professor in Science Policy Studies, University College London). King’s, LSE and UCL are all members of the University of London, a confederation of academically and financially autonomous colleges with a long history of joint endeavours in education and research.

Position Papers

I initiated a joint NGO Position Paper to the first set of  expert meetings in the 2018-2020 intersessional cycle. The position paper sets out collective views on key action points for the 7-16 August 2018 meetings. I delivered a statement introducing the position paper on the opening day of the meetings. Watch the archived livestream of the meeting with my delivery of the statement at 3:02:00.

UN General Assembly First Committee

The First Committee Monitor is a collaborative NGO effort undertaken to make the work of the First Committee more transparent and accessible. In 2018, I wrote the first set of contributions focusing solely on biological weapons.

Workshops

Civil society plays an important role in supporting biological arms control and non-proliferation. In a December 2015 workshop in Geneva – convened together with Chatham House, ILPI and GCSP, and supported by Switzerland – I brought together more than 30 participants from a wide variety of civil society organizations, research institutions, international organizations and a select group of states to start exploring ways in which to enhance the role and contribution of civil society to the BWC.

I continued the dialogue on civil society engagement with the BWC by convening a June 2016 workshop in Geneva together with ILPI, a October 2016 workshop in Washington DC together with the biodefense program at George Mason University, and a December 2017 workshop in Geneva together with the Geneva Disarmament Forum.

Tributes

I paid tribute to Dr John Walker on his retirement from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office in May 2020.

Julian Perry Robinson, the grandfather of non-governmental research into the control of biological and chemical warfare, sadly passed away in April 2020. To me, Julian was the heart and driving force of the British CBW community. I and colleagues set up a tribute page to Professor Julian Perry Robinson as a way for the CBW community to collectively say goodbye and pay their respects.

I paid tribute to Rafael Pérez Mellado, a long-standing expert from Spain, who sadly passed away in April 2018, in the NGO statement to the Meetings of Experts.

Dr Volker Beck, a long-standing BW expert from Germany, sadly passed in December 2017. Many of us in the NGO community had the privilege to work alongside him for many years, and I collated our tributes to him in a memorial book to Dr Volker Beck.

I paid tribute to Dr Graham Pearson on his retirement from the role of NGO Coordinator in November 2016.