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Fadel Abdulghany
On July 9, 2026, the Executive Council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons adopted Decision EC-112/DEC.7, which restored to Syria the institutional rights and privileges that had been suspended in April 2021. The State of Qatar submitted the draft decision, and sixty-six other States Parties joined in co-sponsoring it, bringing the total number of sponsoring states to sixty-seven, and it was adopted by consensus. This decision didn’t stand alone in that session; on the same day, the Council adopted three decisions linked to it: a detailed plan for the verification of the destruction of Category 3 chemical weapons in Al-Qutayfah, an agreement for the systematic verification of the storage facility in Al-Qutayfah, and a similar agreement for the storage facility in Homs. This interconnection shows that the restoration of rights came coupled with operational arrangements for verification and destruction.
The importance of the decision lies in the outcome of the vote, and, more importantly, in the shift it reflects in the path of the Syrian chemical weapons file; it moved from a phase marked by repeated use, then the denial of it, the concealment of information, and the obstruction of investigations under the Assad regime, to a phase built on the cooperation of the current Syrian authorities with the Organisation, the opening of the sites and records to its teams, and the work on uncovering what remains of the chemical weapons program and destroying it. However, the decision doesn’t close this file, doesn’t acknowledge the completeness of the Syrian declaration, and doesn’t touch the criminal responsibility for the chemical attacks; rather, it restores to Syria its institutional rights while its substantive obligations remain in place, and the verification and investigation procedures continue.
The Use of Chemical Weapons and the Basis of the Suspension
Understanding the 2026 decision requires going back to the original reason that led to the suspension of Syria’s rights in 2021. The matter wasn’t a technical dispute over incomplete documents or undeclared materials; rather, it came following an international investigation that concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the air force of the Assad regime used chemical weapons in the Al-Lataminah attacks.
In 2018, the States Parties to the Chemical Weapons Convention established the Investigation and Identification Team (IIT), and entrusted it with a mandate that goes beyond establishing that an attack took place to identifying the party responsible for it in the cases where the Fact-Finding Mission has established the use of a toxic chemical. In April 2020, the Team issued its first report on three attacks that took place in the city of Al-Lataminah in the Hama countryside in March 2017. The report concluded that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the air force of the regime used sarin in two attacks, and chlorine in a third attack that targeted the city’s hospital. The importance of this report lies in that it didn’t limit itself to establishing the presence of chemical agents in the abstract, but identified the military party responsible for specific attacks.
Building on this report, the Executive Council adopted, on July 9, 2020, Decision EC-94/DEC.2 under the title “Addressing the Possession and Use of Chemical Weapons by the Syrian Arab Republic”. The wording of the title shows that the decision wasn’t descriptive; rather, it constituted a measure to address a situation of non-compliance. Its wording also reflects the relationship between the use and the undeclared possession; the Council considered that the use of these weapons proves, by direct inference, that the earlier declaration and destruction didn’t cover the entire chemical weapons program. The decision granted the Syrian authorities a deadline of ninety days to take three measures: declaring the facilities, materials, and munitions connected to the Al-Lataminah attacks; disclosing all the chemical weapons that remained in its possession; and addressing the deficiencies in its initial declaration, that is, the statement the Assad regime submitted to the Organisation after Syria’s accession to the Convention in 2013, which was supposed to include all the chemical weapons and their production and storage facilities, yet the verification operations showed that it was neither accurate nor complete. The Assad regime didn’t complete any of these three measures within the set deadline, nor did it cooperate with the Investigation and Identification Team.
Against this backdrop, the Conference of the States Parties adopted, in April 2021, Decision C-25/DEC.9, and suspended three institutional rights: the right to vote in the Conference of the States Parties and the Executive Council, the right to stand for election to the Council, and the right to hold offices in the Conference, the Council, or their subsidiary organs. The suspension rested on paragraph 21(k) of Article VIII, concerning the powers of the Conference in matters of compliance, and on paragraph 2 of Article XII, which permits restricting or suspending the rights of a State Party if it fails to fulfill a request to take measures to redress the situation. The decision didn’t suspend Syria’s membership in the Convention, didn’t exempt it from its obligations relating to declaration, inspection, destruction, cooperation, or refraining from the use of chemical weapons, and didn’t bar it from attending the meetings or submitting documents.
The Path of Restoration and What Remains in Place
The fall of the Assad regime in December 2024 didn’t lead to the creation of a new state or the nullification of the prior international obligations. International law distinguishes between the state and the government, and Syria remained the same State Party, bound by the same obligations. What changed is the political will to cooperate, and the extent of the Organisation’s ability to reach the sites, documents, and persons. In February 2025, the Director-General visited Damascus, and the Syrian authorities affirmed their recognition of all the mandates of the Organisation, including the mandate of the Investigation and Identification Team. Since March 2025, the Technical Secretariat has dispatched teams belonging to the Office of Special Missions to declared and suspected sites, where they collected samples, conducted interviews with former experts, and obtained documents that hadn’t been available for more than a decade. On October 23, 2025, the Technical Secretariat re-established a continuous presence for the mission in Syria, built on the rotation of multidisciplinary teams. These activities showed the existence of materials, equipment, munitions, and facilities that the Assad regime hadn’t declared, as well as programmatic documents of a wide scope. On June 15, 2026, the Syrian authorities amended their initial declaration, and added facilities, materials, munitions, and storage sites that hadn’t been listed in it, which confirmed the assessment the Technical Secretariat had announced years earlier, that the declaration of the Assad regime was neither accurate nor complete.
As for the criterion of assessment, the 2021 decision tied the restoration of rights to the Director-General’s confirmation that Syria had completed all the measures required in July 2020. However, this criterion wasn’t fully met; nineteen issues out of twenty-six issues raised by the Technical Secretariat remained unresolved as of June 29, 2026. To address this gap, the Executive Council paved the way by adopting Decision EC-110/DEC.1 on October 8, 2025, on the accelerated in-field destruction of the remnants of chemical weapons, which encouraged the Conference of the States Parties to reconsider the suspension decision if the progress in removing those remnants continued. On November 28, 2025, the Conference adopted Decision C-30/DEC.8, which created a new exceptional path, as it delegated to the Executive Council the authority to decide the restoration of rights taking into account the progress made. In practical terms, this allowed the restoration of the rights before the completion of all the measures set out in the 2020 decision, with those measures and the outstanding issues remaining due for resolution. This approach was confined to the circumstances specific to Syria. The July 2026 decision rested on this delegation, and considered that the actual cooperation of the Syrian government, the opening of the sites, the submission of documents, and the amendment of the declaration justify the restoration of the institutional rights at the present stage, with the oversight continuing.
The restoration of the institutional rights entails no effect whatsoever with respect to the criminal responsibility of the persons who planned the chemical attacks, ordered them, carried them out, or contributed to concealing the evidence related to them. The functions of fact-finding, investigation, and identification remain in place, though they have become, since June 2025, coordinated and implemented within the Office of Special Missions. Likewise, the conclusions of the Joint Investigative Mechanism, whose mandate ended in November 2017, remain part of the official record concerning the use of chemical weapons in Syria. The Technical Secretariat continues to preserve the relevant information and to make it available to the International, Impartial and Independent Mechanism and the other competent UN investigative bodies. I have pointed to this matter because it’s connected to the upcoming destruction operations; the destruction plans must include the documentation of the sites and materials, and the taking of samples and their preservation in accordance with chain-of-custody safeguards, in a manner that ensures that the urgent disposal of the hazardous materials doesn’t harm the existing or upcoming criminal investigations. The scale of the sites, materials, and outstanding issues is likely to require continued financial and technical support that goes beyond the current stage. The report of the Director-General estimated the additional needs for the year 2027 at some 12.3 million euros, with the indication of the continuing need for financial and human resources for the upcoming missions.
