Setting a Standard for Stakeholdership: Industry Contribution To a Strengthened Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Egmont Paper No. 52, December 2011

Zanders, Jean Pascal (2011) Setting a Standard for Stakeholdership: Industry Contribution To a Strengthened Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. Egmont Paper No. 52, December 2011. [Policy Paper]

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Abstract

Excerpt from preface: The present collection of articles follows from a one-day seminar The Biological Weapons Convention, Biosecurity and the Industry organised by the Belgian Foreign Ministry in Brussels on 20 June 2011. Among the attendants were Belgian and European representatives from the life sciences, the biosafety and -security community, and the pharmaceutical industry, as well as Belgian Government officials involved with disarmament. Ambassador Paul van den IJssel, President-Designate of the 7th BTWC Review Conference, closed the proceedings. One of the seminar’s central themes was to investigate how the life sciences industry – one core stakeholder remaining wholly in the background of the discussions on the future of the BTWC – could become more involved. Speakers from the aforementioned communities zoomed in on industrial standards for biosafety and biosecurity being developed for laboratories in research and industry facilities as a possible point of entry. In follow up to the seminar, the idea arose to explore this lesser-known opportunity in more detail and highlight its possibilities and limitations from three different perspectives: biorisk management, industry practice and government responsibility in formal disarmament. The Belgian Royal Institute for International Relations Egmont agreed to publish the contributions in its Egmont Papers series in collaboration with the European Union Institute for Security Studies.

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