In the absence of a treaty protocol or verification regime, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) instituted confidence-building measures (CBMs) as a mechanism to increase confidence in compliance by enhancing transparency and mitigating ambiguities regarding states parties’ biological activities. While a promising tool to support treaty compliance, low participation, concerns regarding the completeness and accuracy of CBM submissions, a dearth of analysis, and restricted access to many submissions have limited CBMs’ value. Through interviews with 53 international experts—38 from BWC delegations and 15 independent experts—we identified concrete opportunities to increase CBMs’ value while mitigating the burden on states parties. This study supports states parties’ efforts in the BWC Working Group on the Strengthening of the Convention, as part of a series of research on BWC assurance that aims to characterize challenges around BWC verification and increase certainty in BWC compliance.

Focusing on the achievements and failures of the 2017 Crans-Montana negotiations, this study examines the research question of how and why the last talks failed to resolve the Cyprus issue. It argues that progress in the negotiations was hindered by the enduring mistrust between the community leaders and the inadequacy of their resolve to reach common ground by reconciling their respective differences about the security and guarantees issue. The study suggests the process that helped bring about the Northern Ireland Good Friday Agreement offers a practical and effective approach to compare with the case of a seemingly intractable situation such as the Cyprus problem. The Irish–British negotiations were open to and involved a wide range of parties including the government, civil society, and international stakeholders. Moreover, they benefited from the decision to set a firm deadline for the conclusion of the negotiations. The findings of this study stress that because the previous Cyprus talks lacked an inclusive and transparent negotiation process – one with stated deadlines complete with alternative scenarios in the event of a referendum – they failed to address the broad gap of trust between the two Cypriot communities.

There has been a drop in clinical research in India following stringent conditions put in place by the Indian Supreme Court in 2013. The Court's orders came in the wake of irregularities highlighted in the conduct of clinical trials in the country. This paper highlights the steps taken by the Indian regulator, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organisation to comply with these directions. These are of three kinds: strengthening regulatory institutions, protecting participant safety and creating regulatory certainty for sponsors and investigators. Examples include the large-scale training of Ethics Committees, framing detailed guidelines on compensation and audiovisual recording of the informed consent process, as well as reducing the time taken to process applications. It is expected that these measures will inspire confidence for the much-needed resumption of clinical research.