UNITED NATIONS - As the 2006 Smalls Arms Survey was being circulated at the United Nations on Monday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan accepted a photo petition from one million people worldwide calling for tougher controls over the global arms trade.
The circulation of the survey, by Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies, and the delivery of the Million Faces Petition were not a coincidence. This week marked the start of a two-week Small Arms Review Conference aimed at evaluating progress since governments agreed on a programme of action to prevent, combat and eradicate the illicit trade in small arms and light weapons.
Xavier Torres, a victim of gun violence, looks over a sculpture in the shape of an AK-47 made of mannequin limbs at an exhibition of the Million Faces for Petition near United Nations headquarters in New York, June 26, 2006. The petition gathers one million signatures and portraits of people from around the world calling for stricter controls on global arms trade.REUTERS/Keith Bedford (UNITED STATES)
| The Million Faces Petition symbolised the number of people killed by guns since the programme of action was launched at the last U.N. small arms conference in 2001.
"In a world awash with small arms, a quarter of the estimated four-billion-dollar annual global gun trade is believed to be illicit," said Annan. "Their continued proliferation exacerbates conflicts, sparks refugee flows, undermines the rule of law and spawns a culture of violence and impunity."
The survey says there are an estimated 200 million modern firearms owned by government armed forces worldwide, but only 16,360,000, or eight percent, have been formally acknowledged. The AK-47 represents the largest portion of the global inventory of military firearms, accounting for a total production of 70-100 million since 1947.
The U.S. is by far the biggest official importer and exporter of small arms and light weapons, exporting 370 million dollars worth of small arms in 2003 and importing 623 million dollars worth.
However, underreporting by governments is prevalent, the survey adds. For example, while official Russian exports were low, at about 40 million dollars, the country does not report many of its exports, and the survey estimated its total small arms and light weapons exports for 2003 at 431.8 million.
Of the 26 leading small arms and light weapons exporting countries detailed in the survey, the U.S. is the number one recipient of the exports of 20 countries.
The 2006 Small Arms Trade "transparency barometre" lists the major exporters of small arms and light weapons and rates their overall performance in providing timely and comprehensive reports and customs data to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (U.N. Comtrade).
The U.S. and Germany received the highest scores -- 20.5 and 19, respectively, out of a possible 25.
On the other hand, North Korea, Israel and Iran all scored zeros, failing to provide any export reports or customs data to U.N. Comtrade.
Some countries, according to the survey, keep their export and import information classified. The export data on Iran, for example, had to be compiled by looking at the U.N. Comtrade reports of transparent countries that imported from Iran.
"The entire global arms trade is not sufficiently regulated," Anthea Lawson, a spokesperson for International Action Network on Small Arms, told IPS.
"As in previous years, there are some exporters, presumed to be important in the authorised small arms and light weapons trade, about which relatively little is known," the survey stated. "These include Bulgaria, China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, the Russian Federation, and Singapore. Finding information on the small arms and light weight weapons exports of these countries is often very difficult."
Therein lies a major challenge to the 2001 programme of action, according to some experts, who say that preventing and eradicating the illicit small arms and light weapons trade will be impossible if some countries insist on maintaining secret export and import records.
Moreover, even where the trade is dominated by rogue arms dealers and corrupt groups, and not the governments themselves, experts argue that individual governments would be better off maintaining a traceable record of small arms imports and exports.
"Unfortunately, there is no international transparency requirement by which countries must abide," Rachel Stohl, a senior analyst at the Centre for Defence Information, told IPS. "We need to have some kind of transparency regime that will ultimately identify countries that violate U.N. arms embargoes or even track weapons that are used to violate human rights."
"Good proposals have been put on the table by NGOs but governments have not made any real effort to enforce them," said James Paul, executive director of the Global Policy Forum, an organisation that monitors policy-making at the U.N.
Last June, the Open-Ended Working Group on Tracing Illicit Small Arms and Light Weapons (OWEG) successfully negotiated the "International Tracing Instrument", which was adopted by the General Assembly in December 2005. The fundamental principle of the tracing instrument was to promote international standards for the marking and tracing of all small arms and light weapons.
The instrument "represents a modest, but important, step forward in global efforts to address the small arms problem," according to the survey.
However, staunch opposition, led by the U.S., to the tracing instrument's adoption as a legal document, as opposed to a political one, delivered a major blow to its overall effectiveness and efforts to accurately trace the origins of illicit small arms and light weapons, according to some experts.
"The tracing instrument is important for marking and tracing of weapons used in committing and atrocities and criminal actions," noted Lawson.
The U.S., Egypt, Israel, and Japan all opposed a legally binding tracing instrument, while the European Union member states, the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa all preferred a legal document. Those countries argued that the instrument had to be legal in order for the document to be enforced, and that governments needed a legally binding document to amend national laws accordingly, according to the survey.
"Legally binding documents usually have a little more force behind them than political documents, which rarely have punitive or enforcement measures," Stohl said. "The U.S. has consistently opposed any document to which it would be legally obligated."
Paul agreed. "There is a very broad ideological opposition in Washington to measures that would strengthen multilateralism," he said. "The current government is supported by a conservative coalition that has made it a point to oppose restrictions of arms within the U.S. They take that same attitude they have within the borders and apply it internationally."
Paul said that proper regulation and tracing of small arms is not impossible. He likened the steps that could be taken to solve the lingering problem of illicit arms sales to the Kimberly Process. The Kimberly Process is a joint-government international certification process that regulates the trade of diamonds in rebel-held, conflict areas.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment