Ten months ago, this blog questioned whether the world needed an Arms Trade Treaty. This week, the second effort at producing a treaty wraps up in New York. The conference got off to a rocky start last week, with strong disagreements about how the text should proceed. The conference's president put out a new draft text of the treaty last Friday, which has produced a new round of chaos this week.
As noted by Ted Bromund at Heritage, who has written extensively about (and mostly in opposition to) the treaty, many countries believe the new treaty is too watered-down. This sentiment is shared by human rights group Oxfam, a coalition of NGOs that has strongly pushed for an arms trade treaty; Oxfam's statement on Monday said that the new text unacceptably fails to control the sale of ammunition and that its requirement for assessing the risk that arms will ultimately be used to commit is currently too lenient. Concerns by major arms exporters have included the U.S. opposing the inclusion of ammunition, which it believes is too difficult to monitor, and China opposing restrictions on arms "gifts," which it makes to allies without any monetary exchange.
As noted in our previous post, the U.S. already a very rigorous arms control regime and transparently publishes statistics about the amounts and receiving states of its arms sales. Countries like Russia and China do not, and although the treaty first called for transparent reporting, it now calls for closed-door reporting to U.N. officials. This is problematic, as countries like Russia and China can continue to mis-report or not report at all their arms deals, and there will be no public record to expose their claims. Rather, such a closed-door reporting system could possibly allow such countries (and many others) to publicly claim transparency and compliance while continuing to secretly arm dictators and other human rights abusers.
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