22/02/2008 Social Affairs, Health and Sustainable Development
“International cooperation is vital in addressing the problem of chemical weapons dumped in the Baltic Sea after World War II, all the more so since interstate agreements have been forged to use the seabed for economic purposes” said Gedimionas Jakavonis (Lithuania, ALDE), rapporteur of the PACE Committee on the Environment today in Paris at the opening of a hearing on the subject.
The construction of a pipeline on the seabed of the Baltic Sea would inevitably disturb the areas in the sea where chemical weapons were known to have been dumped, he warned. According to the rapporteur, not all the sites have been detected and their condition is still unknown. He therefore regretted that the United States and the United Kingdom had decided to classify the information they have on this subject. Some 292,000 tons of chemical munitions were dumped in the Baltic. The report is to be presented at a plenary session of the Assembly.