The head of the global chemical weapons watchdog on Thursday defended the removal of Syria's voting rights, saying it showed an "ethical commitment" to eliminating toxic armaments.
Damascus and its ally Moscow slammed Wednesday's vote by a majority of countries at the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons to punish Syria.
Russia and Syria said the decision, made after an investigation found Syria had carried out three sarin and chlorine attacks in 2017, showed the regulator was becoming politicised by the West.
But OPCW chief Fernando Arias said this week's conference of member states "reaffirmed that the use of chemical weapons is the most serious breach of the convention there can be, as people's lives are taken or destroyed".
"By deciding to address the possession and use of chemical weapons by a state party, the conference has reiterated the international community's ethical commitment to uphold the norm against these weapons," Mr Arias said.
France introduced the motion on behalf of 46 countries, including Britain and the US, to punish Syria after it failed to answer questions about the weapons used in the 2017 attacks on the village of Lataminah.
Eighty-seven countries voted in favour of the motion, while 15 including Syria, Russia, China and Iran voted against and 34 abstained.
Syria's rights will remain suspended until member states decide that Damascus has fully declared all of its chemical weapons and factories.
Syria says the Lataminah attacks were fabricated and that it surrendered all of its chemical weapons after joining the OPCW in 2013, following a suspected sarin attack that killed 1,400 people in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta.
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Sheffield United 2 Bournemouth 1
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
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