Ambassador Leonardo Bencini (Italy) was President of the 9th Review Conference of the Biological Weapons Convention, which took place in Geneva, from 28 November to 16 December 2022.

This is one of the three major treaties focused on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that underwent a Review Conference process over the course of less than a year between August 2022 and May 2023, along with the tenth Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in August 2022 and the fifth Review Conference of the Chemical Weapons Convention in May 2023.

Although these treaties and their respective Review Conference processes vary, the experiences over 12 months between August 2022 and May 2023 provide an important snapshot of the state of the WMD treaty regime. As such, there is merit in reflecting on these three processes jointly and exploring the commonalities and differences across three agreements dealing with the world’s most destructive weapons, as well as gathering lessons learned for future work in these fields.

To this end, UNIDIR invited the Presidents of the three Review Conferences to provide their reflections on their respective Review Conference processes, publishing these in a special report on the subject: https://unidir.org/RevCon-Reflect

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