OPCW Executive Council recommends next director-general for appointment

The Eighty-Sixth Session of the Executive Council (EC) of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) recently reached a consensus recommendation for the next Director-General of the OPCW Technical Secretariat to be appointed.

The EC recommended that the Twenty-Second Session of the Conference of the States Parties appoint H.E. Fernando Arias, the permanent representative of the Kingdom of Spain, to the OPCW. Arias would be appointed to a four-year term of office to begin on July 25, 2018.

The annual Conference of the States Parties will take place from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1, 2017, at the World Forum in The Hague, The Netherlands.

The OPCW is the implementing body for the Chemical Weapons Convention and oversees the global effort to permanently and verifiably eliminate chemical weapons. Since its creation in 1997, the OPCW includes 192 States Parties and is the most successful disarmament treaty eliminating an entire class of weapons of mass destruction. More than 96 percent of all chemical weapon stockpiles declared by possessor States have been destroyed under the OPCW.