ABSTRACT

The majority of the world’s governments will negotiate the first legally binding and comprehensive Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The key aim of this treaty is to proscribe the international transfer of arms that are likely to be used to perpetrate widespread human rights violations in situations of conflict or armed violence in general. On October 30, 2009, the UN General Assembly First Committee voted in favor of the draft resolution and timetable to negotiate a strong and robust Arms Trade Treaty in 2012, with 158 states voting in favor, 19 abstentions and only Zimbabwe voting against. Then, United National Resolution A/RES/64/48, The Arms Trade Treaty, was adopted by the General Assembly on December 2, 2009. The stated goal of the United Nations Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty will be to elaborate a legally binding instrument on the highest possible common international standards for the transfer of conventional arms (UNGA Res. 64/48 para. 4). One of the central remarkable aspects of this development is the final acceptance of the United States to be part of the process. Two landmark and majority votes in the UN General Assembly paved the way for this remarkable process, which was started at the beginning of the 1990s by Oscar Arias, the former president of Costa Rica, and the other Nobel laureates. In 2006, with overwhelming support, the UN General Assembly’s

First Committee voted for the first time that governments should negotiate an ATT. The resolution (UNGA 2006b) was co-authored by Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan, Kenya and the United Kingdom, the initial core group of states promoting the ATT. When the resolution came to vote, 153 countries supported the resolution, 24 abstained, and only the United States voted against it. Without the support of the United States (until 2009), this extraordinary endorsement spurred a range of unprecedented activities in the UN furthering the Nobel laureates’ initiative. The secretary-general invited submissions of views from states on the feasibility, scope and criteria of a potential ATT. During 2007 he received over 100 submissions and decided to convene a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) created to identify both elements of consensus and divergent views. The GGE presented its report in August 2008 (UNGA 2008c). This led to another huge majority vote later that year in the General Assembly in the fall of 2008 (UNGA 2009b). In this instance, 147 states approved the formation of an Open-Ended Working Group that would meet in the following three years.1 The period of time analyzed in this chapter stops before this last effort and aims to identify the process of norm emergence and regime building reflected in the ATT process. The arising norm in question-the unprecedented effort to restrain conventional arms transfers-is described subsequently. During the Cold War, several regimes developed aimed at setting norms curbing the use and trade of weapons of mass destruction (i.e. chemical, biological and nuclear weapons). There was no comprehensive attempt to cover conventional weapons in general, with the exception of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. This was an important treaty, based on international humanitarian law, but of limited scope (it covered only a few weapons), and it is not as widely adhered to as would be desirable. The three significant majority votes referred to above crystallized the ATT idea as part of the UN agenda and endorsed the establishment of the rising international norm that aims to set up common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms. On September 21, 2006, Arias wrote about the “Deadly hole in global security” in a piece in the Boston Globe. He advanced the idea that a total restructuring of the way in which leaders pursue security is needed in the twenty-first century. Leaders were still tied to shortsighted strategies of a long-gone Cold War era of proxy wars and funding brutal dictators and were still perpetuating old strategies of arming their countries in a vain quest for security. The most important role in global security could be fulfilled by the ATT, where no more arms would be transferred for the perpetration of atrocities. The principle driving the initiative is straightforward, Arias said: the proscription of transfers in cases where there is a risk that the arms will be used to commit abuses. The ATT therefore requires fresh thinking on international security in which the predominant quest is not for more arms, but for the application of international law. This thinking requires states to reflect anew and leaders not to carry out immoral acts or disrespect human rights.