During its Second session, the Conference on the Establishment of a Middle East Zone Free of Nuclear Weapons and Other Weapons of Mass Destruction adopted a decision to establish, on an informal basis, a Working Committee to continue deliberation on issues related to the mandate of the Conference (General Assembly decision 73/546), based on the outcomes of each annual session of the Conference.

The working committee held three meetings in the intersessional period between November 2021 (the Second session) and November 2022 (the Third session) of the Conference. Kuwait, the President of the Second session of the Conference, chaired all the meetings of the Working Committee.

The first meeting was held on 24 March 2022 at the UN Headquarters in New York and decided on the organizational aspects of the Working Committee. It was agreed to hold two additional Working Committee meetings before the Third session of the Conference, in November 2022.

The second meeting of the working committee, which was its first substantive meeting, held a thematic discussion on 7-9 June 2022 at the UN Headquarters in New York. The discussion was structured based on the President’s informal food-for-thought paper which contained ideas for the consideration of delegation on the seven issues named in the report of the Second session as requiring further consideration. Those are:

(a) Accession by Members to the Conference to relevant multilateral legal instruments related to weapons of mass destruction;

(b) Conditions for entry into force of the treaty;

(c) Verification mechanism for biological weapons;

(d) Other verification measures and the Model Protocol Additional to the Agreements between States and the International Atomic Energy Agency for the Application of Safeguards;

(e) Unilateral coercive measures;

(f) Secretariat of the treaty;

(g) Depository of the treaty. .

At that meeting, participants agreed to carry out further discussions at a third meeting in an informal and in-depth manner on two key topics, namely “legal aspects of the future Middle East zone treaty” (which was understood as also encompassing issues around accession to other WMD treaties), and “verification in relation to nuclear weapons” with inputs from invited experts. An initial list of experts proposed by the Secretariat was noted, and it was agreed that Members to the Conference (which include all Arab states, Iran, and Israel) would supplement the list with additional national experts.  

The Working Committee held its third meeting from 6 to 8 September 2022 at the Tarrytown House Estate, New York. During this meeting, experts were invited to give presentations on the “legal aspects of the future Middle Eat zone treaty” and “verification in relation to nuclear weapons”.

Following the presentations representatives of Members to the Conference engaged in interactive discussions with the experts on those key topics.

A summary of the work of the Working Committee was included as an annex to the report of the third session of the Conference. Aside from listing the names of the invited experts and the agenda topics they spoke under, the summary only included general information about the dates and conduct of the meeting but did not reflect any of the substantive discussions among states.