International Criminal Law
During the summer of 1986, starting with an outline that had been made at Harvard the previous January, Robinson and Meselson prepared the first full draft of an international convention that would make the development, production, possession and use of biological and chemical weapons crimes under international law, patterned after existing treaties such as those that criminalize airline hijacking, piracy, and torture. They subsequently refined the text of the convention on the basis of suggestions from two meetings of legal scholars that we organized at Harvard in January 1997 and at the Lauterpacht Center for International Law at Cambridge University in 1998.
The present version of the Draft Convention was published in the December 1998 issue of the CBW Conventions Bulletin and in a special issue of the Bulletin in 2011, together with a chronology and bibliography. The Convention has been translated into the several official languages of the UN. and an extensive legal commentary on the Convention was prepared with the aid of several generations of Harvard law students. The existing CBW conventions apply to states, not individuals. Although there is no current international law holding individuals criminally liable for activities prohibited by the CBW conventions, the HSP Draft Convention may in future provide an impetus for such an enhancement of the regime against CBW weapons and warfare.
The Chemical Weapons Convention entered into force on April 29, 1997. It prohibits the development, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention, and use of chemical weapons. There remained dispute regarding the legality of the use in war of so-called riot-control agents such as agent CS, massively used in military operations by the US in the Vietnam War. In editorials in the Bulletin and in other writings we argued against any interpretation of the Convention that would exempt such chemicals from use as weapons of war, believing that any such exemption seriously risks unravelling of the Convention, that the most durable prohibition is "no gas".