THE news remains dominated right now by the fallout from Salisbury. The issue of chemical weapons, their use and apportioning blame, are reverberating from London’s corridors of power to the Kremlin and back again.

As has become depressingly predictable during any crisis, the British Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, has once again been found seriously wanting. By any reckoning he should be out of a job by now. That’s unlikely though given that the UK Government has shown itself adept in only two capacities; individual political opportunism and self-preservation.

Amidst all the rancour over Salisbury and who has or hasn’t got or used chemical weapons, there wasn’t so much as a peep this week in the UK about what happened almost exactly a year ago in the north-western Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun.

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Readers may recall the distressing video footage that emerged at that time. Men, women and children convulsing in agony, choking, foaming at the mouth and suffocating after the nerve agent sarin or a sarin-like substance were dropped on to Khan Sheikhoun during Syrian airstrikes.

More than 80 people died that day and hundreds more were wounded, in one of the worst chemical attacks since sarin gas killed nearly 1,500 civilians, including more than 400 children near the Syrian capital, Damascus, in 2013.

Syria’s government has denied involvement and claimed it no longer possessed chemical weapons. But a subsequent investigation tasked by the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) confirmed that the chemical attack on Khan Sheikhoun did happen, and that the Syrian government was responsible for the killing of civilians.

Here in the West we have watched all this with what amounts to a chilling detachment. Yes, much was made at the time of President Barack Obama’s talk of crossing the “red line” enunciated a year before the first of these strikes, when he said that if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons, it would warrant US military action.

In the end Mr Obama’s threats were just that, threats. Even the US President’s closest supporters called his handling of the red line statement and its crossing a “debacle” and the administration’s “worst blunder”.

Since then, it appears to matter even less that innocent Syrian civilians are exposed to these odious weapons. Here in Britain there has been no end of party political point scoring over the Government’s handling of Salisbury. Rarely in the past weeks, though, has there been mention of the wider threat chemical weapons pose elsewhere or the urgent need to seriously re-examine the implementation of an international regulatory framework concerning their use.

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In the five years since chemical weapons were first used in Syria, international attempts to halt and bring crimes such as these to account have been consistently undermined. Despite widespread condemnation, pleas, sanctions and even a recent US airstrike, the international community still appears impotent in stopping the use of chemical weapons against civilians in Syria.

There are of course identifiable reasons for this, not least power politicking. International law bans chemical weapons through the 1992 Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires its 192 state signatories to refrain from using, producing and stockpiling them. Only four states across the world are not parties to the convention. One state has signed but not ratified, that being Israel. Three states have neither signed nor ratified – Egypt, North Korea, and South Sudan.

Whether the Russian state was behind Salisbury or not, what is undeniable is Moscow’s use of its veto at the UN Security Council to prevent holding the Syrian government accountable for its chemical weapons violations. Just last November, Russia did just that when it blocked the renewal of the mandate of the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), which the Security Council had set up bringing together the UN and the OPCW to ensure those responsible for chemical weapons attacks in Syria were brought to task.

Since the JIM ceased to operate, the Syrian government has likely carried out at least five more chemical weapons attacks. Right now there exists no UN or OPCW entity to identify the party responsible for these violations. This means that with the exception of a few unilateral sanctions brought by the likes of the US and European Union, those responsible are a long way from being identified and brought to account.

Given this state of affairs there is no telling where this might lead. Right now just about any despot, rogue state, terrorist group or global criminal network might willingly see chemical weapons as a viable tool in their arsenal.

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As Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, a chemical weapons adviser to NGO’s working in Syria and Iraq who specialises in disaster management pointed out recently, “the 100-year taboo on the use of chemical weapons has been completely broken.” Given this it wouldn’t be surprising if we end up seeing more chemical weapons proliferation across the world than we’ve been witness to so far.

For some time now, it’s been blatantly clear that the international community has been turning a blind eye to the war crimes perpetrated through chemical weapons use in Syria. Such weapons have no place in the world today and their use anywhere threatens us all. As Salisbury and Syria have both shown, it’s more important than ever to prevent the neutering or dismantling of any chemical weapons watchdog like the JIM and OPCW.

Neither body to date has had any independent coercive power and they are only as powerful as countries allow them to be. That needs to change. To that end international cooperation and transparency among countries on chemical weapons are more important than ever.

This week the UN met on the first anniversary of the Khan Sheikhoun attack to discuss the global threat chemical weapons now pose. At The Hague meanwhile, the OPCW voted down Russia’s proposal for a new joint investigation into the poisoning of ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Both events were of enormous significance, but here in the UK, Boris Johnson was getting himself into yet another diplomatic fankle over Salisbury. Others meanwhile simply preoccupied themselves with party political point scoring.

It really is time for the UK Government and our politicians to get serious about the dangerous world we live in and the pressing need on so many fronts for a grown-up foreign policy. Having said that, I’m not holding my breath.