DOI: 10.46340/eppd.2025.12.4.2
Oleksii Plotnikov, PhD in Law
Civic Organization “The Tenth of April”, Odesa, Ukraine, senior lawyer
How to cite: Plotnikov, O. (2025). The Restriction of Riot Control Agents Under the Chemical Weapons Convention of 1993: Legal Problems and Future Perspectives. Evropský politický a právní diskurz, 12, 4, 12-19. https://doi.org/10.46340/eppd.2025.12.4.2
Abstract
The article examines the formation and development of the international legal regime of riot control agents as a specific type of chemical weapons and the prohibition of their use in hostilities. It emphasizes the awareness of States of the need to prohibit chemical weapons and further addresses the balance which the Chemical Weapons Convention tried to achieve in the definition of substances that were potentially subject to prohibition. The study includes a step-by-step analysis the formation of the legal regime of prohibition of chemical weapons from the 1925 Chemical weapons protocol to the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention. The article explains the difference in the chemical properties of chemical weapons and riot control agents and notes that no absolute distinction can be drawn between the two, since the lethality of chemical weapons (including riot control agents) is determined not by their chemical compound, but by concentration and the circumstances of their use. The article further addressed the rationale behind the prohibition of riot control agents in hostilities and permission of their use for law enforcement purposes. The article analyzes the different approaches of States towards the prohibition or restriction of use of riot control agents in hostilities. Special attention is paid to the question of escalation risk, which may arise in case of legal use of riot control agents, that may be perceived as illegal or treacherous by the adversary. It arrives to a conclusion, that available State practice demonstrates insufficiency of approaches to the restriction of riot control agents due to absence of clear-cut prohibition of riot control agents in hostilities in the instruments regulating the conduct of armed forces. In addition, the study concludes that existing domestic regulations require improvement in order to establish clear rules on the use of riot control agents by the armed forces for law enforcement purposes. Finally, the article proposes the avenues for further research of the topic, which lie in the analysis of application of riot control agents in threshold situations, like peacekeeping missions or non-international armed conflicts, as well as in the development of concrete criteria for the determination of escalation risk in cases of lawful use of riot control agents.
Keywords: arms control, chemical weapons, chemical weapons ban, Chemical Weapons Convention, riot control agents, weapons in international law, definition of weapons, legality of weapons.
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