| Lack of arms trade treaty a disgrace: Ban |
UNITED NATIONS UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon pleaded late on Tuesday for a binding pact to regulate the more than $60 billion global weapons market, while delegates at a treaty drafting conference worked to defuse a dispute over Palestinian participation.
“We do not have a multilateral treaty of global scope dealing with conventional arms,” Ban told delegates to the conference, which runs through July 27. “This is a disgrace.”
“Poorly regulated international arms transfers are fuelling civil conflicts, destabilising regions, and empowering terrorists and criminal networks,” he said.
Arms control campaigners say one person every minute dies from armed violence around the world and that a convention is needed to prevent illicitly traded guns from pouring into conflict zones and fueling wars and atrocities. They say conflicts in Syria and elsewhere show a treaty is necessary.
If the campaigners get their way, all signatories would be charged with enforcing compliance with any treaty by arms producers and with taking steps to prevent rogue dealers from operating within their borders. They would have to consider nations’ human rights records when deciding whether to export arms.
“Our common goal is clear,” Ban said. “A robust and legally binding arms trade treaty that will have a real impact on the lives of those millions of people suffering from the consequences of armed conflict, repression and armed violence.”
“It is ambitious, but I believe it is achievable,” he said.
There are deep divisions on several issues to be tackled in the treaty negotiations, such as whether human rights should be a mandatory criterion for determining whether governments should permit weapons exports to specific countries.
A dispute over whether the Palestinians should participate in the conference as an observer without voting rights - the status they have in the UN General Assembly - or as a state party with voting rights delayed the start of the conference by more than a day before it was resolved, delegates said.
The Palestinian Authority’s permanent observer to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour, said that since the arms trade treaty negotiations are what he called “an international conference of states,” the Palestinians should be a full participant.
Because of Palestine’s recognition as a state by Unesco, Mansour said, it should have the same status at the arms treaty talks.
The UN Arab Group’s insistence that the Palestinians have full participation as a state caused the United States and Israel to threaten to leave the conference, delegates said.
“Without the United States, the world’s biggest arms supplier, it would be hard to get a meaningful treaty out of this conference,” a Latin American diplomat said on condition of anonymity. Israel is also a major arms supplier.
In the end, the Palestinians and the Vatican delegation, which also wanted full participation rights, reluctantly accepted the right to sit at the front of the negotiating hall next to Argentina, but without the right to participate as states with voting rights in the consensus-based talks.
Reuters
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