Más de medio siglo después de la entrada en vigor de la Convención sobre Armas Biológicas (CAB), aún no existe un sistema permanente para verificar su cumplimiento. Dado que el último intento importante de subsanar esta deficiencia fracasó hace 25 años, la necesidad de una disposición de verificación se hace cada vez más innegable. La biotecnología es más potente, está más extendida y es cada vez más digital.
More than half a century after the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) entered into force, it still has no standing system for verifying compliance. Since the last major attempt at closing that gap failed 25 years ago, the need for a verification provision is becoming harder to ignore. Biotechnology is more powerful, more widely distributed, and increasingly digital. A backdrop of geopolitical mistrust makes allegations about prohibited biological activities harder to resolve—and confidence in compliance is becoming harder to sustain on national assurances alone.
It has always been a high bar to expect a BWC verification system to deliver a binary “compliant” or “non-compliant” judgment—all biotechnology has permissible and beneficial uses. But properly assessing compliance has become even more challenging than it might have been in 2001, when states parties made significant headway on verification. Back then, verification proposals could still center largely on declarations and visits to identifiable physical facilities, such as biodefence laboratories and vaccine-production plants. Now, in a time of rapidly developing biotechnology, a digital genetic sequence might pose as much of a potential bioweapons threat as a live virus sample.
Still, BWC member states see the need for treaty verification. And next year they could approve a formal working group to explore the contours of a future regime. And when they do, they should seek to build a verification scheme that generates robust, independently acquired and mutually intelligible evidence.
Allegations of treaty violations have often been colored by geopolitical tension as adversaries cast suspicion on one another’s biological activities. By developing a trusted source of factual information on compliance issues, treaty compliance discussion can rise above political distrust. Through the use of tools like financial-style audits of biological governance and infrastructure, they can become more than just easily dismissed assertions.
A complex effort. States last began to try and close the verification gap in the 1990s. An organization known as the Ad Hoc Group spent several years negotiating a legally binding protocol built around declarations of relevant facilities and activities, clarification procedures, visits and investigations. By 2001, a detailed composite text existed, but disputes persisted over how intrusive the system should be, whether it could reliably detect cheating, and how to protect sensitive commercial and national-security information. In July 2001, the United States rejected the draft protocol, arguing that it would not provide meaningful confidence in compliance and could expose sensitive information; later that year it also opposed continuing the Ad Hoc Group’s mandate. The process collapsed.
Recent momentum to revisit verification is emerging as BWC states parties have been negotiating recommendations on how to strengthen the treaty. The current strengthening process is broader than verification, with states also examining—among other topics—how the treaty should keep pace with scientific and technological change, how to improve confidence-building, and how to strengthen international cooperation.
Now states parties are weighing whether to create a new working group on compliance and verification issues. Its remit could include declarations, on-site and off-site approaches, scientific and technological developments, institutional arrangements, investigations, and, importantly, how different verification measures might complement one another. Whether to establish such a working group will ultimately be decided in 2027, when BWC delegates meet for the once every-five-years treaty review conference.
Instead of trying to resurrect a verification architecture designed for the biotechnology of the 1990s, states could ask a more fundamental question: What should verification mean for the biology we actually have today?
Biology is different. The BWC does not prohibit bacteria, viruses, fermenters, DNA synthesizers, laboratories, or vaccine plants. Almost everything that could contribute to a biological weapons program also has legitimate peaceful applications. The treaty’s central organizing principle is therefore what’s known as the “general purpose criterion”: Biological agents and toxins are prohibited when their type or quantity cannot be justified for prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes. Ultimately, the distinction between permitted and prohibited activity turns on purpose.
That has always made verification difficult. Today it is harder still. Biotechnology is becoming more widely distributed, and capabilities relevant to biological weapons increasingly reside not simply in pathogens or specialized pieces of equipment but in data, automation, engineering expertise, artificial intelligence, and distributed manufacturing. There is consequently no biological equivalent of simply counting nuclear warheads or accounting for tons of declared chemical agent.
Compliance is ultimately an assessment of evidence that must be interpreted in context.
At present, transparency under the BWC rests largely on annual confidence-building measures, through which states provide information on matters including relevant laboratories, biodefense programs, unusual disease outbreaks, national implementation measures, past biological weapons programs, and vaccine-production facilities. These measures can reduce ambiguity and suspicion, but they rely on information supplied by states themselves and do not constitute verification.
As BWC delegates consider the issue, they should consider what role “bioaudits”—an idea raised in a 2025 Hoover Institution report—could play. Under this concept, professional, independent third parties would scrutinize university laboratories, biotechnology companies, and government facilities for weaknesses in biosafety, biosecurity, dual-use governance, and operational compliance—with the auditors themselves being accredited and held to common professional standards.
In the corporate world, financial regulators do not conduct financial audits because they assume every company is dishonest—but neither do investors, regulators, or markets simply take corporate claims on trust. Independent scrutiny creates a reason for confidence. Bioaudits would take a similar form to financial auditing.
The report also briefly proposes coupling bioaudits to the BWC. My argument here is broader: Bioaudits could become one component of a layered BWC verification system. They could help to generate independent evidence on which justified judgments can be built, building what I call “justified compliance.”
Crucially, an audit would not establish categorically that a state is complying with the BWC. After all, a laboratory could pass a rigorous biosecurity audit while a clandestine program operated elsewhere. And a state deliberately violating the BWC is hardly likely to volunteer its secret weapons facilities for inspection by a third-party auditor. These objections, however, are not arguments against bioaudits. Instead, they tell us where bioaudits fit in the bigger picture.
Effective, biological verification should be constructed in layers.
One layer is routine transparency. This would involve things like engaging in BWC confidence-building measures, declarations, voluntary visits, and releasing publicly available information. Bioaudits would serve as a layer to provide assurances about how biologically-relevant institutions are operating.
Another layer would comprise national regulation, licensing of labs, and inspection of facilities.
Above that might sit a layer of international verification measures, including declarations, visits, and technical assessments.
The most coercive layer might be mechanisms for investigating suspected non-compliance or alleged biological weapons use.
None of these layers would answer every verification question, but together they can generate something much stronger. A bioaudit could, for example, substantiate information contained in a national declaration. Internationally recognized audit standards could make information about laboratories more comparable across countries. Audit findings might reveal anomalies requiring regulatory attention.
Conversely, evidence that facilities conducting specified categories of work are subject to credible independent scrutiny could increase confidence in a state’s national implementation system.
Voluntary to mandatory? Developing a bioaudit system raises many difficult questions.
Who sets the standards? How is auditor independence protected? How much information is reported publicly or internationally, and how much remains confidential? How are conflicts of interest and “audit shopping”—where organizations attempt to seek a favorable auditor—prevented? How could developing countries participate without bioauditing becoming another costly condition attached to biotechnology? And which activities are sufficiently consequential that governments might eventually require audits rather than simply encourage them?
Indeed, participation could initially be voluntary at the BWC level while becoming mandatory domestically for defined classes of institution or activity. Financial auditing again offers a useful analogy: Audits are optional for some organizations and legally required for others. “Voluntary,” therefore, need not mean weak.
A sensible first step could be modest. Interested BWC states, scientific organizations, standards bodies, laboratories, and professional auditors could begin developing and testing common audit methodologies. States could explore what minimal information from an audit—its scope, standard, accreditation, outcome, and remediation status, to name a few examples—might usefully accompany national BWC reporting without exposing proprietary or security-sensitive information.
If states eventually agreed to a mandatory verification framework, accredited bioaudits could become one required component for defined categories of facilities or activities.
Bioaudits would not be a substitute for declarations, international inspections, or investigations. Ideally, they would provide independent assurance about what actually happens inside the laboratories and organizations performing modern biotechnology. They may turn out to be an important missing layer.
The verification debate now opening in Geneva should therefore resist the temptation to ask which single instrument can “verify the BWC.” The better question is what combination of independent, mutually reinforcing measures can make confidence in compliance progressively more justified. Twenty-five years after the last attempt at BWC verification failed, that would be a genuinely new place to start.
Fuente: https://thebulletin.org
