Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Burundi
On May 3, 2024, the Ambassador of the Republic of Burundi in The Hague Her Excellency Madame Isabelle NDAHAYO presented her letters of credence to the Director General of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Mr Fernando Arias.
The Chemical Weapons Convention was signed in Paris on January 13, 1993 and become valid on April 29, 1997. The convention is the unique and the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire category of the weapons of the massive destruction and provides for the international verification. It is also the first Chemical Disarmament Treaty negotiated in a fully multilateral framework.
The convention also provides for the inspection to ensure that the chemicals are used only for the purposes not prohibited by the convention. The convention’s primary objective is to promote the international cooperation between the States Parties in the peaceful use of chemistry.
The uncontrolled chemical weapons constitute one of the serious security challenges facing the entire world today. To deal with that problem, Burundi has taken the various measures, undertaken the initiatives to control and ban the chemical weapons on its soil by adhering to the various national and international legal instruments against those deadly products.
Burundi has a few expert trainers in the field of the civil protection with the support of the training offered by the Secretariat of the Organization for the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons. There is also the center of the excellence for the Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) agents in the Central and East African region which is in collaboration with the Coordination of the National Authority of Burundi for a workshop online training on the chemical risks and their reduction.
Internally, those experts provided the training to the Breweries and Lemonaderies of Burundi (BRARUDI) and the Organo-mineral fertilizers (FOMI) staff on the subject of protecting themselves against the chemicals in the workplace. On April 14, 2021, the team of Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) agents from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Development Cooperation as well as the Civil Protection and Education executives carried out a raid to carry out the assessment of the state of the chemical products in the laboratories stored at the technical school of Bubanza.
The National Authority of Burundi cooperates effectively with the Customs Administration in the implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention in the sense of the collecting data on the imported chemicals in order to produce an annual declaration of the chemicals to the Organization for the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons.
It is planned to organize an awareness workshop for all stakeholders, namely: the government agencies, the industries, the research institutions, the laboratories, the transport companies, the customs agencies to take an ownership of the implementation of the Convention on the Prohibition of the Chemical Weapons in their respective services.