Representatives of 56 countries signed a resolution following the 27th conference in The Hague. The document says that the fact of the use of chemical weapons against Russian citizen Alexey Navalny must be investigated.
“We are fully confident in the conclusion of independent experts of the OPCW that Navalny was poisoned with a nerve agent Novichok”, - the Dozhd TV channel quotes the document.
According to representatives of the countries participating in the Convention on the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the use of Novichok poison, similar to that used in the poisoning of former GRU officer Sergey Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in 2018, testifies to the fact of the use of chemical weapons prohibited by the Convention. The conference participants said that they condemn the attack on Navalny on 20 August this year "in the strongest terms".
The conference participants were perplexed by the fact that even now, more than three months after the incident, Russia has not provided any results of the investigation into the attack on Navalny, although the OPCW sent a request to the country's leadership. Instead of a substantive response, the OPCW received a counter-request from Russia for technical assistance. Without denying this to the Russian side, the member states of the Convention insistently demanded an investigation to be carried out and its results made public.
“Our firm position is that those responsible for the use of chemical weapons should be held accountable”, - the resolution says.
In total, 193 states are party to the Chemical Weapons Convention. The United States, EU countries, Canada, Turkey, Ukraine, Japan, South Korea, Ecuador, Georgia, Colombia, Peru, New Zealand and others signed the resolution on Navalny's poisoning.
Alexey Navalny was urgently hospitalized on August 20 with signs of poisoning. Russian doctors said that the reason for the sudden coma of the politician was "metabolic disorders." However, their conclusions were refuted by European experts, who laboratory-proved the presence in Navalny's body of traces of nerve-paralytic poison from the Novichok group. Despite all this information and repeated appeals to the security officials by the politician's supporters, a criminal case on the fact of the attempt on Navalny's life in Russia has not yet been initiated.