UN approves renewed debate on arms treaty
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E-mail Agencies via China Daily, December 26, 2012
The UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly on Monday to restart negotiations on a draft international treaty to regulate the $70 billion global trade in conventional arms, a pact the powerful US National Rifle Association has been lobbying hard against.
UN delegates and gun control activists have complained that talks collapsed in July largely because US President Barack Obama feared attacks from Republican rival Mitt Romney before the Nov 6 election if his administration was seen as supporting the pact, a charge US officials have denied.
The NRA, which has come under intense criticism for its reaction to the Dec 15 shooting massacre of 20 children and six educators at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, opposes the idea of an arms trade treaty and has pressured Obama to reject it.
But after Obama's re-election last month, his administration joined other members of a UN committee in supporting the resumption of negotiations on the treaty.
That move was set in stone on Monday when the 193-nation UN General Assembly voted to hold a final round of negotiations on March 18 to 28 in New York.
The foreign ministers of Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan, Kenya and the United Kingdom - the countries that drafted the resolution - issued a joint statement welcoming the decision to resume negotiations on the pact.
"This was a clear sign that the vast majority of UN member states support a strong, balanced and effective treaty, which would set the highest possible common global standards for the international transfer of conventional arms," they said.
There were 133 votes in favor, none against and 17 abstentions. A number of countries did not attend, which UN diplomats said was due to the Christmas Eve holiday.
Details of the vote were not immediately available, but diplomats said the US voted "yes", as it did in the UN disarmament committee last month. Countries that abstained from last month's vote included Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Sudan, Belarus, Cuba and Iran.
Russia abstained from voting last month. Britain, France and Germany joined China and the US in the disarmament committee in support of the resolution approved by the General Assembly on Monday.
The draft treaty under consideration does not control the domestic use of weapons in any country, but it would require all countries to establish national regulations to control the transfer of conventional arms and to regulate arms brokers.
It would prohibit states that ratify the treaty from transferring conventional weapons if they would violate arms embargoes or if they would promote acts of genocide, crimes against humanity or war crimes.
In considering whether to authorize the export of arms, the draft says a country must evaluate whether the weapon would be used to violate international human rights or humanitarian laws or be used by terrorists, organized crime or for corrupt practices.
Many countries, including the US, control arms exports, but there has never been an international treaty regulating the estimated $70 billion global arms trade. For more than a decade, activists and some governments have been pushing for international rules to try to keep illicit weapons out of the hands of terrorists, insurgent fighters and organized crime.
The NRA, which wields huge lobbying power in the US, has portrayed the treaty as a threat to gun ownership rights, which are guaranteed in the US Constitution.
In July, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre told the UN that "the NRA wants no part of any treaty that infringes on the precious right of lawful Americans to keep and bear arms". He added that "any treaty that includes civilian firearms ownership in its scope will be met with the NRA's greatest force of opposition".
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