Watchdog authorized to assign liability

BRUSSELS — Member nations of the global chemical weapons watchdog voted Wednesday to give the organization the authority to apportion blame for illegal attacks, expanding its powers following a bitter dispute pitting Britain and its western allies against Russia and Syria.

An 82-24 vote provided the two-thirds majority needed to enlarge the purview of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. The organization was created to implement a 1997 treaty that banned chemical weapons but lacked a mandate to name the parties it found responsible for using them.

Many participating nations saw the inability to assign responsibility as a senseless hamstring, especially after fatal chemical attacks during the war in Syria. Russia opposed adding a new license to the agency’s portfolio, saying that was a decision that belonged to the United Nations.

Georgy Kalamanov, head of the Russian delegation to the OPCW conference, was quoted by Russia’s Tass news agency saying “the situation in the OPCW can be compared to the Titanic, which got a hole and began to sink.”

The vote followed a proposal from Britain. Ambassador Peter Wilson, the British representative to OPCW, said the proposal had 30 co-sponsors and the support for it will allow the Nobel Prize-winning weapons watchdog “not just to say when chemical weapons are used, but by whom.”