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THE Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons has won this year's Nobel Peace Prize.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee honoured the Hague, Netherlands-based global chemical watchdog "for its extensive efforts to eliminate chemical weapons.'

 Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu.

"The conventions and the work of the OPCW have defined the use of chemical weapons as a taboo under international law,'' the committee said. "Recent events in Syria, where chemical weapons have again been put to use, have underlined the need to enhance the efforts to do away with such weapons.''

Based in The Hague, Netherlands, the OPCW was formed in 1997 to enforce the Chemical Weapons Convention, the first international treaty to outlaw an entire class of weapons.

The organization has 189 member states and today's award comes just days before Syria officially joins and even as OPCW inspectors are on a highly risky United Nations-backed disarmament mission based in Damascus to verify and destroy President Bashar Assad's arsenal of poison gas and nerve agents amid a raging civil war.

The peace prize was the last of the original Nobel Prizes to be announced for this year. The winners of the economics award, added in 1968, will be announced on Monday.

Norwegian television reported OPCW had won the award one hour before the official announcement.

"According to information obtained by (public broadcaster) NRK, the 2013 will go to the UN-backed Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW),'' the broadcaster wrote on its website.

A team of around 30 OPCW arms experts and UN logistics and security personnel are on the ground in Syria and have started to destroy weapons production facilities, with footage of their work broadcast on Syrian television.

The OPCW said on Tuesday it was sending a second wave of inspectors to bolster the disarmament mission in the war-ravaged nation.

WHAT IS THE OPCW

The OPCW is an organisation that has spent years trying to rid the world of chemical weapons in relative obscurity.

From Russia to the United States, Iraq and Libya, inspectors from OPCW have been slowly but surely destroying the world's most dangerous chemical stockpiles.

Syria last month signed up to the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC), which the OPCW enforces, agreeing to hand over its chemical weapons for destruction under a Russia-US plan aimed at averting US-led military strikes on the country in the wake of a devastating chemical attack on a Damascus suburb.

President Bashar al-Assad's regime is accused of using the chemicals in an August 21 attack that killed hundreds of people on the outskirts of Damascus. He has denied the charge.

Previously one of only five countries not to have signed the global treaty, Syria accepted the Russian proposal last month to sign up and has so far won rare praise for cooperating with OPCW's inspectors, who are already hard at work.

Ahead of the surprise announcement, the organisation said it preferred to focus on the task in Syria rather than any jubilation.

"We don't want to give any impression that we're focussed on anything else than other than this mission,'' OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan said.

The organisation is expected to hold a press conference later on Friday.

The OPCW began work in 1997 and has overseen the destruction of some 57,000 metric tonnes of chemical weapons, mostly US and Russian arsenals.

"It's the slow steady laying down of bricks over the weeks, months and years, people sitting in control rooms watching this stuff going into the chutes,'' Luhan said.pe``It's our persistence, without any fanfare... it's the slow grinding work that we hope over time will be more appreciated.''peThe OPCW's work was the ``subject of years and years of patient diplomacy in which we've demonstrated that we do diplomacy very, very well. We've kept everybody aboard, we keep adding States Parties, we're approaching universality.''

But Luhan said he did not want the Nobel Peace Prize award to overshadow the dangerous mission in Syria.

"We don't want to be seen as a one-note song,'' he said.

Chemical weapons were first used in combat in World War I, and again in 1988 against civilians in Halabja, Iraq, with the Chemical Weapons Convention finally drawn up in 1993 in Paris.

The CWC came into force on April 29, 1997, and OPCW began its work on the edge of a quiet upmarket leafy suburb in The Hague shortly afterwards.

The Convention was the result of almost 20 years of negotiations at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, and initially aimed to eliminate all the world's chemical weapons by 2007.

It was preceded by the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which banned the use of chemical weapons following widespread use in World War I, but not their development under a ``no first use'' notion.

The OPCW currently has 189 so-called States Parties, including nearly all industrialised nations and more than 98 per cent of the world population.

Israel and Myanmar (Burma) have signed the Convention but not ratified it, while Angola, Egypt, North Korea and South Sudan have done neither.

Syria last month applied to join the Convention and it officially comes into effect in the war-ravaged nation on Monday.

The CWC has four main tasks: the destruction of all chemical weapons under strict verification, monitoring of the chemical industry to prevent development, helping protect nations against chemical threats and boosting global cooperation to strengthen implementation.

``It is the first multilateral treaty to ban an entire category of weapons of mass destruction and to provide for the international verification of the destruction of these weapons,'' according to the OPCW website.

It contains no specific punitive measures for countries that use chemical weapons however.

The document says only that the OPCW can ``in cases of particular gravity, bring the issue, including relevant information and conclusions, to the attention of the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council.''

Between 1997 and 2013 the OPCW carried out 5,167 inspections on the territory of 86 signatory countries, including 2,720 inspections of chemical weapons sites, according to the organisation's website.

Some 81 per cent of world stocks of declared chemical agents have been destroyed under supervision, it says.

The OPCW's head, Turkish diplomat Ahmet Uzumcu, has been in the job since 2010.

A former Turkish ambassador to NATO, the United Nations and Israel, the diminutive diplomat is described by the OPCW website as having ``a thorough understanding of and considerable expertise in political-military affairs, disarmament and proliferation issues.