Ivana Bacik

Biological Weapons Bill 2010: Second Stage

Wednesday, 8 June 2011

Senator Ivana Bacik: I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy O’Sullivan, on her first visit to the House as Minister and congratulate her on her portfolio of trade development at which I know she will be excellent. I am very pleased she has that portfolio.

I welcome the opportunity to debate this Bill which started life as a Bill introduced by the previous Government but which, when it came before the Dáil in October and November, had cross-party support. Speakers from Labour and Fine Gael welcomed and supported it at that stage. It is a Bill on which there is genuine consensus.

The Bill is designed to give effect to international conventions on poisonous gases and biological weapons. It is a third strand in legislation required to give effect to our obligations under conventions banning nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and is best understood as part of that troika of weapons regulations.

The Minister referred to Resolution 1540 adopted by the United Nations Security Council in 2004 which refers to all three types of weapons — nuclear, chemical and biological — all of which it regards as a threat to international peace and security. Given that we have legislation already, particularly on chemical weapons, this was a clear gap to fill to create specific offences here relating to biological weapons.

Of the offences created, notable is an aspect Senator Walsh picked up on, namely, the extra territorial effect we have seen in an extensive range of legislation including the Bill we debated in this House last Thursday on female genital mutilation. That is to be welcomed.

The definition of “prohibited weapon” contained in section 1 means any weapon, equipment or means of delivery designed to use a microbial or other biological agent or toxin for a hostile purpose or an armed conflict. A theme the Minister picked up on, as did other speakers in the Dáil, is the idea that these are agents which can be used for purposes other than hostile purposes. They have been used to develop vaccines and for other beneficial purposes, and the Bill must allow for the use of such substances where necessary. Deputy Upton, in the Second Stage debate in the Dáil, pointed out that there is potential for good while we are recognising in this Bill the horrendous potential for abuse of these substances.

We must also recognise, and it is acknowledged implicitly in the Bill, that the very nature of these biological agents makes it difficult to legislate against them. They have an in-built capacity for mutation and can be produced simply. The UN resolution of 2004 recognised that perhaps the biggest threat now is from non-state agents, persons acting in an individual capacity, as in the 2001 Anthrax attacks in New York, for example. Because biological weapons are relatively simple to produce and have this capacity for mutation, like synthetically produced drugs they can be difficult to legislate against. The terms of the prohibition, therefore, must be carefully framed to be sufficiently broad to capture mutations but sufficiently specific to ensure that only those mutations for hostile purpose are criminalised.

I very much welcome the provisions of the Bill but it is worth examining briefly the context of the Bill and the reasons it is before the House. The American Medical Association is a useful reference guide to biological weapons which sets out some of the appalling harm they can cause. The Minister referred to anthrax but brucellosis, inhalational tularemia, pneumonic plague, smallpox and viral encephalitis are all diseases that can be spread through what the American Medical Association describes as bioterrorism agents. As a hypochondriac, I feel some of the symptoms described could apply to a wide range of illnesses. On reading them one can feel one is developing non-specific ‘flu-like symptoms such as fever, headache, profound weakness, fatigue and so on. That is all spread by bioterrorism agents that spread brucellosis.

Fortunately, the use of biological weapons and biological warfare has been relatively limited. Senator Walsh and others speakers in the Dáil referred to the use of chemical weapons, which perhaps have had more horrific effects, but serious harm can be caused through the relatively small use of biological warfare we have seen. We should remember that it was during the First World War that the German army developed anthrax, cholera and other diseases specifically for use as biological weapons. Some historians write of their use in spreading plague in Russia and among the horses of the French cavalry. That development led us to the Geneva Protocol of 1925, to which the Minister referred as the first multilateral agreement prohibiting both chemical and biological agents. It is a relatively new 20th century variation of warfare.

Later in the 20th century the United States and the Soviet Union in particular developed capacity for biological weapons and tested biological weapons during the 1950s and 1960s. Senator Walsh referred to the iconic image of the child in Vietnam running covered in napalm. I have been to Vietnam and seen in some of its museums the horrific photographs equivalent to that photograph of the devastation caused to children and civilians through the use of chemical warfare through the Vietnam war. It is an appalling indictment and not perhaps sufficiently well known about here because it was not just Vietnam but also in Cambodia and Laos that we saw chemical weapons used at immense human cost and causing consequences that are felt in those countries to this day. We are much more familiar with the horrendous damage caused by nuclear weapons but chemical weapons, and biological weapons, have serious capacity to cause that level of human suffering and harm.

Senator Jim Walsh:    Hiroshima.

Senator Ivana Bacik:    Precisely, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We are more familiar with that because that was on such a bigger scale.

That is not something that has been entirely left behind. The Minister pointed out that no state admits to having or developing biological weapons. No state acknowledges it posses such weapons or that it has a programme to develop them. There is no doubt that the international conventions have acted as a strong deterrent but it is a matter of concern that three states which are noteworthy are not party to the convention, namely, Israel, Egypt and Syria. At a time when we see Syria using dreadful force against its own citizens that is a matter of real concern.

There is also concern that Israel has used weapons in Gaza recently which are in breach of the convention. There have been concerns about Russia using such weapons in Chechnya, and we are aware of Saddam Hussein’s use of chemical weapons against the Kurds in Iraq. There have certainly been relatively recent instances of states at least being suspected of using biological and chemical weapons, often against their own citizens.

This Bill and the international convention are not just directed at states but also at individual users of biological weapons owing to the growing fear of what is called bio-terrorism. The Minister of State referred to the 2001 incident in the US where a number of people were killed by the delivery of anthrax by mail. There was an immense public scare about that at the time. In 1994, a small cult from Japan released anthrax in Tokyo, and there have been periodic scares over the past two decades about further individual threats to use biological weapons to spread anthrax and other kinds of disease. There was a notable arrest in Manchester in 2002 of a number of people suspected of using an apartment as a ricin laboratory to produce toxins.

These periodic scares and incidents where biological weapons have been developed for the suspected purposes of bio-terrorism are cause for concern. They give us a practical reason for having legislation in place. If we see arrests in an apartment in Manchester or if we hear of anthrax being delivered through the post, clearly a matter of concern for states is that small-scale production is going on with the potential to cause immense harm and public scares.

Senator Walsh asked whether these offences should be capable of being prosecuted through summary procedure. Section 4, which deals with penalties, refers to summary convictions where the maximum penalty can only be a class A fine or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months. It seems somewhat hard to think of an offence under this Bill that would be capable of summary prosecution. In other words, such an offence would be regarded as minor, and I struggled with that concept. I was trying to think of someone who perhaps was very peripherally involved, living in an apartment where someone else was developing these weapons, yet who had sufficient knowledge about it that he or she could be prosecuted in a summary fashion. That is the only situation I can think of, but it seems more likely that this would be an indictable offence if someone were ever to be prosecuted. We hope that will not be the case and that this Bill will serve as a deterrent and fill a gap in our legislation.

Ireland has had a strong and proud record in promoting nuclear non-proliferation and the need to legislate at international level against weapons of mass destruction. I see this Bill as another step in our panoply of regulatory prohibitions against weapons capable of causing mass destruction. We have well-documented laws and conventions on chemical and nuclear weapons, and it seems very reasonable that we now pass this Bill on biological weapons. We all hope it will not be put into operation in any real way and that it will serve instead as a deterrent and will fulfil our international obligations. I welcome this Bill and I thank the Minister of State for her speech.