HOPES RAISED midweek for a new international treaty to regulate the conventional arms trade, significantly improved by a new draft text, were dashed at the last hurdle on Friday. Most of the 170 states at the now-adjourned month-long New York UN conference were willing, but the US announced it needed more time – code for domestic political problems – and Russia and China followed suit.
As Syria, Iran, Egypt, Algeria, and North Korea have also opposed the process from the start, making hoped-for unanimity unlikely, supporters of the treaty which include the EU, will now have to rely on majority agreement at the UN General Assembly this autumn. But getting the world’s biggest players in this $60 billion trade – the US is the largest, accounting for 40 per cent of conventional arms transfers – to become signatories now looks impossible.
The treaty would have required signatories to control the international transfer of weapons and ammunition and regulate arms traders, prohibit exports which violate arms embargoes, promote acts of genocide, assist human rights abuses or war crimes, or be used by terrorists or organised crime. It covered arms from battle tanks to large-calibre artillery systems, combat aircraft and helicopters, warships, missiles and launchers, and small arms and light weapons. For the treaty’s supporters the surprise US volte face is deeply disappointing. President Barack Obama had reversed Bush opposition and expressed willingness to back it, but appears to have succumbed to pressure from the National Rifle Association and the Tea Party who portray the treaty as an attack on constitutional gun rights. Last Thursday 51 senators, emboldened no doubt by the president’s silence on curbing access to weapons after the Aurora killings, warned him they would oppose ratification of what they saw as an expansion of gun control.
Yet the draft treaty insists on “the sovereign right and responsibility of any state to regulate and control transfers of conventional arms that take place exclusively within its territory, pursuant to its own legal or constitutional systems”. It states that the treaty’s aim is to establish the highest standards for regulating “the international trade in conventional arms”, not domestic trade.
In the US election season, however, no-one stands up to the gun lobby, now, it seems, not only able to hold US politics hostage, but global politics too. Cold comfort to the 1,000 killed daily worldwide by small arms wielded by terrorists, insurgents and criminal gangs, and the thousands of others who die in wars and civil unrest.