S Sudan to join Chemical Weapons Convention:

South Sudan is  expecting to join the Chemical Weapons Convention outlawing the use of such toxic arms, according to a global watchdog said on Friday.
"South Sudan has no reason to sit on the fence," top foreign ministry official Moses Akol Ajawin told the annual meeting of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), adding his country has almost concluded the process to become the body's "newest and youngest state party".

That leaves just Israel, Egypt and North Korea as the only countries yet to join the arms treaty which came into force in 1997.A total of 192 nations have already signed up to the convention, and more than 96 percent of the planet's declared chemical weapon stockpiles have been destroyed under OPCW verification.
South Sudan is the world's newest nation, having gained independence from Sudan in 2011.

But it has been embroiled in a civil war since December 2013 that erupted when President Salva Kiir accused Riek Machar, his former deputy, of plotting a coup.
Friday's announcement at the OPCW, based in The Hague, came on the final day of the Nobel Peace Prize winning body's annual meeting which had been dominated by the conflict in Syria.

Syria under President Bashar al-Assad finally joined the OPCW in 2013, admitting under US-Russian pressure to having a toxic arms stockpile, and thus staving off threatened US air strikes.

But Damascus came under pressure at this week's meeting to fill the gaps in its 2013 declaration, after an joint UN-OPCW body in its latest report blamed the Syrian air force for a sarin gas attack on the opposition-held village of Khan Sheikhun in April that left scores dead.