The United Nations Security Council has unanimously approved a resolution aimed at identifying those responsible for using chemical weapons in attacks in Syria.
The vote on August 7 came two days after U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reached agreement on the text.
The resolution calls for the creation of a UN panel that will be tasked with identifying who is behind deadly chlorine gas attacks in Syria, which the West has blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's regime.
The Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, the global chemical weapons watchdog, has a mandate to carry out fact-finding missions to determine whether chemical attacks occurred in Syria. But neither the organization nor the United Nations has a mandate to determine responsibility.
The resolution would set up a new UN investigative body to identify those responsible.