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Manchester, 22 August (360info) The treaty’s attempts to satisfy all parties have rendered it useless due to compromises. How best to restore its bite force?
Whatever its final form, the 2014 UN Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) will be born out of a major compromise that no one will ever forget.
The ATT must reconcile national sovereignty with its own legitimate security interests and collective security, international humanitarian law, and even more problematic international human rights law.
The ATT must also understand the basic fact that under international law, all nations are sovereignly equal, but in practice, there are extreme inequalities in the actual import and export of arms.
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Four EU countries (France, Germany, Italy and Spain) are among the top ten exporters, with the US alone exporting as much as the next four combined. The gap between material reality and the formal equality of countries involved in negotiating and implementing the ATT has led to some tricky compromises.
EU countries are already bound by the export control regime of Council Common Position 2008/944/CFSP. For European exporters, the partnership with ATT offers an opportunity to level the playing field by balancing the standards of their overseas competitors to a certain extent, and thus avoid being undermined.
This may explain why the major EU defence industries have shown so much interest in the ATT once negotiations have progressed, coordinating inputs and positions with their national ministries.
At the same time, some importing countries, such as China, Russia or Arab countries, are concerned that international humanitarian or human rights law obligations in the ATT will allow exporters to reject politically unpopular transfers, and therefore seek a framework to ensure importing country rights.
Like the EU, the US had extensive domestic arms export control legislation before the Arms Trade Treaty, but made significant concessions to ensure support during the negotiating stage.
The need to balance these different interests has led to the ATT becoming a supranational legal instrument that bears a great deal of similarity in form to the EU’s common position.
It contains less transparent reporting and scrutiny of authorized exports, and relatively weak protections under international humanitarian and human rights law. Even with the compromises, the U.S. has not ratified the ATT nearly a decade later.
Many scholars have written about these questions. However, any discussion of compromises deemed necessary to gain acceptance during the drafting of the ATT must be considered within the scope of the impact of the treaty’s first decade of entry into force. Currently, arms exports follow demand unless there is a huge expected political cost to a particular transaction.
This is not a new trend, as research has consistently shown how arms trade exports are often authorized despite international humanitarian and human rights law concerns. This suggests that a heavily compromised ATT lacks the substance and means to directly affect a country’s export practices. At the same time, countries are wary of any changes to the treaty’s risk assessment framework.
At the same time, however, widespread adoption of the treaty has not materialized. In particular, major exporters such as the United States, Israel and Russia have yet to sign or ratify, or both.
Increasing universal adoption remains a key objective of the ATT Conference of States Parties. However, this continued effort is not without obstacles. Issues such as lack of implementation capacity, lack of political will or prioritization, and technical skills or knowledge continue to pose challenges to the treaty’s broad universality.
In the context of the ATT and its member states, there is growing recognition of the role that civil society can play in addressing a wide range of treaty issues. It is expected that making civil society an integral part of the local and global universalization drive will help improve treaty adoption.
Civil society can also play an increasing role in implementing several treaties. While this could be a welcome increase in expertise, it could also generate a rebound.
For example, coinciding with Brexit, high-profile legal challenges from civil society have led the UK government to make a series of controversial changes to its arms export regulations, significantly downgrading them from a legal perspective.
Thus, in a politically sensitive context like arms export controls, the large-scale involvement of civil society can be problematic.
The critical situation the AT&T is currently in does not appear to have a clear way forward. Even with compromises made, the reality is that countries that are not parties to the ATT account for more than 60% of global arms exports, with more than a quarter of the remaining countries (EU and UK) already subject to stricter arms control export control regimes than ATT.
To resolve this impasse, it may be necessary to move away from common practice and towards more limited multilateralism, acknowledging the reality of the largest exporters and importers — countries that ultimately determine most of the world’s arms flows. (360info.org)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from the Syndicated News feed, the body of the content may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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