by Maj Rørdam Nielsen, Global Action to Prevent War
As everyone
who has followed the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) process will know, the devil is in
the detail. Five small letters differentiate “trade” from “transfer”. The ATT
negotiating conference started out with the Chair’s 3 July 2012 paper, which stated
that the treaty should apply to “all international transfers of conventional
arms,” including “the transfer of title or control over conventional arms.” The
definition of covered activities has since been continuously narrowed. The President’s
most recent compilation text stipulates in paragraph 2.B.1 that the covered
activities are limited to export, import, brokering, and transit and
transhipment.
To have
provisions that can achieve the treaty’s goals requires that all state parties that are in any way
involved in an arms transfer have a right and obligation to stop the transfer if
it would violate the criteria. This is essential as it is very likely that not
all exporters will become parties to the treaty, or they might authorize an
irresponsible transfer based on incomplete or inaccurate information. Importers,
transit and transhipment states, states that house brokers—including transporting
companies—are complicit in this process and they should not be exempt from
responsibility. The more states that are responsible for preventing illegal and
irresponsible arms transfers, the more difficult such transfers will be. Thus
the term “export” should be replaced with “transfer” in articles 4 and 5 of the
treaty--or regarding article 5, as Katherine Prizeman’s article in this edition
of the ATT Monitor argues, the article better be deleted and the criteria in
that section moved to article 4 so that they are captured in the risk assessment
process. Throughout the draft text, the definitions of transfer activities are
weak. Transport is currently not specifically covered in the treaty, even
though transporting states are actively engaged and financially invested in arms
transfers. Former UN arms trafficking investigator Kathi Lynn Austin, who spoke
at a side event last week, has sharply criticized the current article on
brokering in the draft treaty. She argued in a press release yesterday that
brokering must be defined to include all relevant intermediaries, especially
transporters. Further, it should require licensing and registration of arms
brokers, she said. Likewise, the research organisations TransArms and the
International Peace Information Service earlier this month published a report
on arms transports in which they called for the ATT to include provisions
requiring registration of arms transport providers within each state party’s territory
and requiring authorization requests for all individual arms transports.
To ensure provisions
in the ATT that prevent circumvention of the goals means that what would
normally be considered “trade” in arms, typically between an exporter and an
importer, must be broadened to all transfer activities. The ATT must ensure
that it captures activities such as gifts, leases, or loans. Language to the
effect of “the transfer of title or control over conventional arms” in the
activities section would help close this gap in the treaty text. Getting to the
goals of the ATT in order to prevent the tremendous human suffering caused by
poorly regulated arms transfers requires closing these significant loopholes.
