by Dr. Robert Zuber, Global Action to Prevent War
As delegates to the ATT work out
remaining barriers to treaty language informally, we are left to wonder what
will emerge as final text as well as how that text will likely be interpreted
by a large number of people worldwide who are anticipating more robustness on
weapons transfers than this process might in the end be able to achieve.
As the assistant Secretary-General
for Human Rights, Ivan Simonovic, rightly reminds diplomats with regards to
reporting under existing human rights treaty obligations, the point of
producing reports is not to generate paper, but to change conditions on the
ground.
Likewise, the point of an ATT is not
to generate lofty phrases, but to change conditions on the ground.
This I suspect would adequately
describe the sense of many people worldwide who have watched this process
unfold from a distance, who have high expectations for the final result, but
who have been disappointed many times by the promise that the UN still makes
and promotes, a promise grounded in a security framework which seeks to become
less and less dependent upon weapons and weapons systems.
It probably is the case that this
treaty was oversold in diverse global regions from the start – the UN is
generally more skilled at ‘norm setting,’ but urgency on policy is rarely
rewarded at least in the initial iterations of treaty processes. An ATT
will hardly set the standard for a new security framework, nor will it on its
own eliminate a single weapon system and possibly not even capture a single
illicit weapon now in circulation. But given certain levels of robustness on
both structure and independence of criteria, it can certainly contribute to
bringing that framework about. As such a complementary capacity, the ATT would
be worth all the trouble that it has caused, all the labor it has consumed, all
the patience it has exhausted.
Hopefully, it will also seem worth it to the
millions of people seeking relief from the threats and aftermath of armed
violence. My best guess though is that, regardless of the final
disposition of this month of negotiations, people worldwide will likely still
call out expectations for healing the wounds of their families and communities,
and doing more at both policy and practical levels to prevent the spread of
arms.
