Biological Weapons Convention Working Group

The references on this page are for documents arising from the Working Group to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention. A brief note on cataloguing nomenclature is provided below the list of documents. A fuller guide to the structure is in preparation.
PLEASE NOTE: this page is still under development and the cataloguing system is still being built and so does not yet contain all relevant references from the holdings in the collections. There may also be a delay between new documents being published and being included here.

The Ninth BWC Review Conference (2022) decided that the Working Group should been overseen by an annual Meeting of States Parties and the page Biological Weapons Convention Working Group plus associated Meetings of States Parties lists documents from both series of meetings.

The official websites for the BWC Working Group are:

• First Session (15-16 March 2023)
• Second Session (7-18 August 2023)
• Third Session (4-8 December 2023)
• Fourth Session (19-23 August 2024)
• Fifth Session (2-13 December 2024)
• Sixth Session (11-22 August 2025)
• Seventh Session (8-12 December 2025)
• Eighth Session (9-13 February 2026)
• Ninth Session (17-21 August 2026)
• Tenth Session (7-11 December 2026)

Richard Guthrie’s BWPP daily reports can be found at https://www.cbw-events.org.uk/bwc-rep.html.

REMINDER: the following document list is from a data management system that is still under development and the catalogue is NOT comprehensive at this point.

The cataloguing nomenclature is based around generating a title field that embodies enough information for a user to identify any document through a string of characters. The title field, at the basic level, contains three key elements — a date code, a source code and the document title.

• Date code = the form 2003-0901 which represents 1 September 2003, for example.
• Source code = a code or codes in brackets, e.g, {BWC}. Two letter codes for internet domains are used to indicate countries, so that a document or statement submitted by Singapore to the BWC would be coded {SG} [BWC], for example. When an entity has a document reference system, this will be reflected in the title field between the source code and the document title. As many IT systems cannot handle “/” characters in many contexts, these are replaced by “-” in the title field such that document BWC/WG/5/WP.4 is rendered as BWC-WG-5-WP.4 in the catalogue.
• Document title = fairly self explanatory but may be abbreviated for space.

If you have found this information useful, please consider supporting the maintenance of the Sussex Harvard Information Bank (SHIB) through the Julian Perry Robinson Fund, established in his memory by the University of Sussex. All those who admired and respected Julian’s work are grateful for support to preserve and build upon his legacy.

More detailed searches can be carried out via the following pages:

• Catalogue search returning title and author(s) [for approved guests and above]; or
• Catalogue search within all fields [for HSP Associates only].