|
 |
|||||||||||||
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
Arms Trade Treaty
During the 1990s the conventional weapons trade was the subject of heightened political attention from governments and non-governmental organizations alike. The first international transparency measure, the UN Register of Conventional Arms (a voluntary tally by UN member states of their annual exports and imports in seven major weapons categories), was established in 1992 following recommendations of a UN Experts Group in which Project Ploughshares participated. In 1991 Canada was one of the first countries to publish an annual report on the export of military goods (again due in part to the work of Project Ploughshares), a practice shared by a number of suppliers by the end of the decade (Sweden, South Africa, UK, among others). Nevertheless, the international arms trade is not governed by any formal international agreement to control or restrain arms transfers. It is now widely agreed that bringing that trade under effective control will require multilateral cooperation and formal agreements. Toward that end the arms control community has come to focus increasingly on the pursuit of internationally agreed codes of conduct. Through the effective work of European NGOs, a European Union Code of Conduct on Arms Exports was approved in 1998, obligating EU members, among other things, to share data on arms sales and to report reasons for approving exports previously denied by other member states. By the end of the 1990s the US Congress had instructed the President to begin negotiations on an international code of conduct on arms trade. In May 1997, under the leadership of Oscar Arias and the Arias Foundation of Costa Rica, a group of Nobel Peace Laureates published a draft International Code of Conduct on Arms Transfers which called for the adoption of internationally agreed standards to regulate the international transfers of arms based on humanitarian law, human rights obligations, and the requirements of international peace and stability. Project Ploughshares is a member of an international group that built on this code to promote an international convention (now called the Arms Trade Treaty or ATT) to regulate the transfer of weapons between countries. This group, the ATT Steering Committee, launched the “Control Arms” campaign in October 2003 to coordinate civil society initiatives across the world, to draw attention to the impact of an unregulated arms trade, and to call on governments to negotiate a legally binding Arms Trade Treaty. During 2004 Ploughshares was a key contributor to the report Guns or Growth: Assessing the impact of arms sales on sustainable development that was published in June 2004. The report proposes a framework for arms export approval in keeping with ATT criteria by more fully assessing the impacts of arms transfers on sustainable development. The landmark decision by the UN General Assembly in December 2006 to launch an ATT process was in large part due to effective civil society initiatives coordinated through the “Control Arms” campaign. Following the UN General Assembly decision, the ATT Documents (Project Ploughshares documents) Background (Key documents and websites about an ATT) |
||||||||
 |
l 
l 
l
l 
l 
l 
l 
l 
l  |
 |