A three-year campaign spearheaded by leading human-rights and humanitarian organizations got a huge boost yesterday when most of the world's countries, including Canada, voted to begin working on a treaty to control small arms and light weapons.
Despite the objections of the United States, which said it was doing a good enough job controlling such weapons, a United Nations committee voted overwhelmingly to begin drafting a treaty that would prohibit weapons from reaching conflict zones.
“This massive vote to develop a global small-arms treaty is an historic opportunity for governments to tackle the scourge of irresponsible and immoral arms transfers,” Kate Gilmore, of Amnesty International, said in a statement.
“Any credible treaty must outlaw those transfers, which fuel the systematic murder, rape, torture and expulsion of thousands of people.”
Since 2003, Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Network on Small Arms, have been lobbying hard under the Control Arms Campaign umbrella to regulate the world's small-arms trade. But the idea of setting up globally binding rules on arms transfers began in 1995 with a few Nobel Peace laureates, including Oscar Arias, the former president of Costa Rica, and Amnesty. They argued that existing national laws provide too many loopholes and that there are too many inconsistencies in current international controls.
The Control Arms Campaign says it has amassed more than one million signatures in favour of a treaty. Among them are 15 Nobel Peace Prize winners.
A UN resolution calling on Secretary-General Kofi Annan to authorize the establishment of a group of experts to write a set of “international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms” was supported by 139 countries. There were 24 abstentions, among them leading arms manufacturers and sellers China, Russia, Pakistan and India.
The spokesman for the U.S. mission at the UN explained the United States objection this way: “The only way for a global arms trade treaty to work is to have every country agree on a standard. For us, that standard would be so far below what we are already required to do under U.S. law that we had to vote against it in order to maintain our higher standards.” Jeremy Hobbs, director of the charity Oxfam, said that since the Control Arms Campaign began about one million people have been killed by conventional arms.
“Today, the world's governments have voted to end the scandal of the unregulated arms trade,” he said.
But there is a long way to go before a treaty is drafted, let alone enacted.
The resolution asks the UN Secretary-General (by then, South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general designate) to submit a report by late 2007 on the “feasibility, scope and draft parameters for a comprehensive, legally binding instrument establishing common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms. . . .”
Afterward, the secretary-general would form a group of experts to examine the issue in detail.
Earl Turcotte, Canada's representative, said during the debate on the resolution that Canada is fully committed to strengthening international rules to curb the transfer of conventional arms.
He said combatting the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons — while respecting the legitimate rights of lawful arms producers, exporters, retailers and owners — is an important part of Canada's foreign policy.
