AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
PRESS RELEASE
AI Index: IOR 40/016/2005 (Public)
News Service No: 188
14 July 2005
UN ‘deal’ on arms controls means business as usual for the world’s worst arms dealers
Joint Statement by the Control Arms campaign: Amnesty International, Oxfam International, IANSA
The new UN agreement on a system to track small arms and light weapons is toothless and riddled with loopholes,
according to the Control Arms campaign. The agreement, obtained by the campaign, was negotiated behind closed doors and
will be publicly debated for the first time at the UN in New York today.
The Control Arms campaign warned that the failure to agree a legally binding system to track weapons means that
unscrupulous arms dealers will continue to get away with selling weapons to serious human rights abusers and war
criminals without being traced. They also said it was a worrying precedent that the UN Small Arms Process had taken four
years to come up with such a weak output.
Most governments had backed a much stronger, legally binding agreement that covered ammunition as well as weapons, but
the opposition of just a few countries, particularly the United States, Iran and Egypt, means that the chance to have a
serious impact on the activities of arms dealers has been lost.
The agreement will set up a system to record the serial numbers of small arms and light weapons when they are sold or
transferred between countries. However, rather than a legally binding system that would have helped bring those
responsible for grave human rights abuses to justice, by enabling weapons to be traced, the agreement is essentially a
voluntary one.
Innocent people in poor countries will pay the price of this failure to agree a legally binding system to track lethal
weapons,said Anna MacDonald, Director of Campaigns for Oxfam. Countries who already have good records on arms control
may comply, but for those countries who routinely sell weapons to the world’s worst regimes, it will be business as
usual. There is more likelihood of being able to trace a missing suitcase than machine gun bullets.
As well as being, in practice, voluntary, the agreement is weakened by two major loopholes. Firstly, it completely
excludes ammunition, shells and explosives. Often, spent ammunition cartridges and rocket shells are the only clue that
investigators have at the scene of an atrocity so it is vital that ammunition shipments are also marked so they can be
traced. Excluding it from the agreement will help traffickers and killers evade justice.
Secondly, an explicit loophole in the agreement allows any country to refuse to disclose information about arms sales on
the grounds of "national security". It is feared that this will be used as a convenient excuse by those selling arms to
oppressive regimes.
It's ludicrous to exclude bullets and explosives from such a global agreement on tracing when these are being used
everyday to indiscriminately kill, displace, suppress and intimidate people. This narrow and essentially voluntary
agreement is barely worth the paper it is written on, said Denise Searle, Amnesty International’s Senior Campaigns
Director.
Last year, at the scene of a massacre in Gatumba, Burundi, in which 150 people were killed, spent cartridges showed that
the ammunition used in the attack was manufactured in China, Bulgaria and Serbia. However, the lack of any tracing
mechanism meant that it was impossible to prove how it got there. Had such a system existed, those who sold the
ammunition to the killers could have been held accountable and future supplies could have been stopped.
It is outrageous that a tiny group of countries has obstructed a useful agreement that would have made a real
difference, said Rebecca Peters, Director of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA).
Although campaigners found little to welcome in the new agreement, small steps forward include the duty on states to
ensure that all illegal small arms and light weapons found on their territory are uniquely marked and recorded, or
destroyed; and the obligation to keep comprehensive records on all marked weapons for at least 20 years.
Setting up a binding global system to track small arms, light weapons and ammunition is one of the aims of the Control
Arms campaign, which was launched by Oxfam International, Amnesty International and the International Action Network on
Small Arms (IANSA) in 2003. The campaign’s main focus is the call for an international Arms Trade Treaty, to ban all
arms transfers that are likely to lead to violations of international human rights and humanitarian law.
For more on the Control Arms campaign visit: www.controlarms.org
ENDS
The debate on the UN agreement on tracking small arms and light weapons will take place today (Thursday) at 14.00 GMT
(10am in New York) at the Biennial Meeting of States at the United Nations in New York. Governments are discussing
progress made on the UN Programme of Action on small arms at the meeting.