The United States said it would boycott on Tuesday’s session of the Conference on Disarmament amid fears that Syria is using its presidency of the body to ‘normalise’ the regime.
“Based on Syria’s repeated attempts last week to use its presidency of the Conference on Disarmament to normalise the regime and its unacceptable and dangerous behaviour, we are not participating in today’s session,” Robert Wood, the US ambassador to the Geneva-based body, said in a statement.
“We will continue to defend United States’ interests” in the disarmament body, he added. Syria last week took over the body’s rotating, four-week presidency, which according to a decades-old practice among its 65 member states follows the alphabetical order of country names in English.