§ Mr. FlynnTo ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what new policy initiatives were put forward by the United Kingdom ambassador to the chemical weapons disarmament negotiations when they resumed on 13 June in Geneva.
§ Mr. WaldegraveI visited the conference on disarmament in Geneva on 15 June. As well as delivering a speech giving an overview of British policy, I tabled a paper on the United Kingdom's innovative work on "challenge inspections", a crucial part of the verification regime for a chemical weapons convention. This work involves a comprehensive programme of trial inspections at military facilities and is designed to test the concept of challenge inspection in practice to enable effective provisions to be elaborated. As far as we are aware, the United Kingdom is the first country to carry out such work which reflects the Government's practical, problem-solving approach to the achievement of a comprehensive and effectively verifiable, global ban on chemical weapons.