By Kelsey Gallagher
Published in The Ploughshares Monitor Winter 2024
This past August, States Parties of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) marked a milestone when they gathered in Geneva, Switzerland for the 10th Conference of States Parties (CSP10). But celebrations were subdued.
The conflict in Gaza had wrought destruction across most of the Strip, killing thousands of civilians. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine had ground on for more than two and a half years, with few prospects for a peaceful resolution. UN bodies warned of a looming genocide in Sudan as millions fled the civil war. Other conflicts raged in Ethiopia, Myanmar, and the Sahel. Some states in the room were openly arming some of the belligerents to these conflicts – sometimes in flagrant violation of core ATT obligations.
CSP10, therefore, offered an appraisal of both the ATT’s achievements after 10 years and its obvious limitations in reducing the humanitarian toll of the international arms trade. If ATT States Parties cannot work to remedy such a significant shortcoming in the coming years, the ATT risks losing credibility.
Achieving universality
CSP10 provided an opportunity to take stock of what has been achieved over the decade since the Treaty came into force. During this time, the ATT has gained 116 States Parties, almost two-thirds of the world’s nations. Malawi, The Gambia, and, most recently, Colombia are the latest to join.
However, some major players are missing. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), the United States is the largest arms exporter in the world, shipping 42 per cent of all weapons between 2019 and 2023; Russia, in third spot, shipped 11 per cent. Neither country is currently a State Party to the Treaty. The absence of these two states alone means that approximately 53 per cent of global arms transfers are not subject to the ATT’s human-rights risk assessments, which States Parties are obligated to perform.
It is also the case that, while states continue to join the ATT each year, the rate of accession has slowed. Two regions – the Asia Pacific and the Middle East – are seriously underrepresented. One of the tasks of the incoming President of CSP11, Argentina, will be to plot a course to boost membership, with universalization the thematic focus for the 2025 conference cycle.
It is important to recognize that bringing more states into the ATT fold is not simply a metrics game. Increasing ATT membership contributes to positive norm development, which extends even to those states that have not acceded (and perhaps will never accede) to the ATT. As norms develop, the irresponsible transfer of arms is subjected to greater stigmatization (as happened, for instance, with cluster munitions and anti-personnel landmines), reducing the likelihood that conventional arms can be procured by human-rights abusers or bad actors.
Focusing on key concerns
Civilians continue to bear the brunt of the violence in today’s conflict zones. Findings published by the United Nations (UN) show a record number (32,990) of serious violations were committed against children across 26 conflict zones last year. Much of this violence was wrought with the conventional arms that the ATT is meant to control.
Despite the very real humanitarian costs of the global arms trade, the ATT’s conference cycles have become increasingly devoid of substantive discussion on actual arms transfers and are instead bogged down in endless discussions on process and protocol. Little time or space is left for the ATT community to address the real crises to which arms exports are contributing. Indeed, it has become taboo to mention these catastrophes in the conference room.
Also rarely discussed by States Parties, until recently, were the problematic recipients of arms exported by ATT States Parties. However, in the most recent CSP cycle, the war in Gaza played a significant role.
February’s Working Group meetings included a special panel session to discuss arms exports to Israel, which UN bodies have said “must end immediately.” This session was unique in ATT annals; it explicitly focused on an ongoing conflict for which a host of States Parties were providing weapons, with a key belligerent – Israel – in the room as a signatory state. However, little time was allotted to this special session, with a number of States Parties and signatory states, including some European countries and Canada, not able to take the floor and offer official government positions on the matter. It was rumoured that some powerful States Parties in the room – including some of Israel’s major arms suppliers – were relieved when the conversation was cut short.
Instead of something to be avoided, such sessions are exactly what the ATT community needs. The ATT was designed to provide a forum to address problematic arms transfers that exacerbate human rights abuses. And it remains the only appropriate forum to discuss potential violations of the ATT itself, which would include arms transfers to any parties to the current conflict in Gaza.
Allotting adequate time to priorities
At CSP9 in 2023, the ATT’s Management Committee pushed to alter the time allotted to Working Group meetings during the CSP10 cycle. The main reason offered: efficiency.
Typically, States Parties would participate in two weeks of meetings of Working Groups in advance of the one-week Conference of States Parties in August. But during 2024, the time allotted for Working Groups was reduced to one week in February and two days of informal preparatory meetings in May.
While there were legitimate reasons to maximize efficiency, it became clear during the CSP10 cycle that this trial arrangement did not allow enough time for States Parties, let alone civil society and other stakeholders, to further the goals of the Treaty. As well, it is not clear that the conference cycle has become more efficient, with no indicators provided to determine this. The current Working Group configuration will stay in place for the CSP11 cycle, on a trial basis, and a formal assessment will then be conducted.
Achieving transparency
A key objective of the ATT is to increase transparency in the global arms trade. This is achieved, in part, through the submission of annual reports by States Parties to the ATT Secretariat, detailing arms exports and imports. States Parties can opt to provide private reports, which are only viewed by other States Parties, or public reports that are accessible to the public. Civil society has consistently called on governments to publish public reports to fully realize the Treaty’s objective of transparency.
The ATT builds upon other transparency mechanisms of the conventional arms trade, such as the UN Register of Conventional Arms
(UNROCA). But while reporting to UNROCA is voluntary, annual reporting to the ATT Secretariat is required under Article 13.3.
There are benefits to annual reports. First, they shine a light on the international arms trade, which is notoriously opaque. Although most states import or export at least a few weapons each year, significant secrecy still clings to this segment of the international economy and contributes to, inter alia, illicit transfers, corruption, and arms diversion.
Second, transparency builds confidence. The proactive and transparent reporting of arms transfers reduces suspicion among potential adversaries and diminishes the likelihood of arms races among actors.
Even with mandatory reporting, transparency is hard to achieve among ATT States Parties. At the time of writing, less than two-thirds of States Parties had submitted annual reports for 2023, and many that did submit missed the de facto June 7 deadline, with a number also opting to report privately.
Remaining credible
What can States Parties do to further the mission and ensure the viability of the ATT? Here are some suggestions.
The ATT’s Management Committee must provide clear benchmarks for the CSP11 cycle so that the effectiveness of reducing the allotted time for Working Groups can be judged. While no stakeholder would argue against ensuring an effective and efficient ATT, during CSP10, some states argued that the reduction in time for Working Groups was a resounding success, without providing the criteria or justification on which to base these assessments.
It is clear that the world currently needs more of the ATT, not less. During CSP11, the ATT community must determine the best configuration of Working Group days, with a view to maintaining as much time for them as possible. It would also be helpful to consider introducing a formal ATT review mechanism to determine the effectiveness of annual CSPs as currently configured. Such a review mechanism is missing from the ATT but is common in other disarmament processes.
For the ATT process to remain credible, States Parties should be encouraged to engage in frank and candid conversations on controversial arms transfers that breach the ATT’s core principles. In this way the Treaty will continue to be relevant in a world that is still awash with conventional arms that fuel human-rights abuses. These discussions can be conducted in special sessions, like the one in February; in a new sub-working group; or as a standing agenda item on the application of ATT Articles 6 (“Prohibitions”) and 7 (“Export and Export Assessment”).
To further the Treaty’s goal of transparency and ease the reporting burden on states, the ATT Secretariat should continue to build links with other reporting mechanisms, including UNROCA. Even though reporting to UNROCA is voluntary, some ATT States Parties opt to report only to the Register – even though they would meet the ATT’s transparency obligations by simply providing the ATT Secretariat with their UNROCA reports. Regional reporting workshops and direct engagement with states that fail to provide information to the ATT Secretariat on their annual arms exports and imports would help to encourage submissions to all appropriate bodies.
