Campaign begins to start gun treaty negotiations

UNITED NATIONS — Seven countries have launched a campaign for the U.N. to start negotiations on a new treaty regulating the global arms trade to help prevent the illegal transfer of guns that kill and maim thousands every day.

John Duncan, Britain’s ambassador for multilateral arms control and disarmament, said the four-week meeting of the General Assembly’s disarmament committee, which started Monday, will be “pivotal” in deciding whether to launch formal negotiations on a new Arms Trade Treaty.

According to a report published this week by the British relief agency Oxfam and 11 other non-governmental organizations, some 2.1 million people — overwhelmingly civilians — have died either directly or indirectly as a result of armed violence since the General Assembly first voted in December 2006 to work toward a treaty regulating the growing, multibillion dollar arms trade.

This is the equivalent of more than 2,000 people dying every day — worse than one person killed each minute, the report said.

“There is an overflow of government sponsored and private illegal armies, ethnic militias and non-state guerrilla forces,” former U.N. humanitarian chief Jan Egeland, who now heads the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, said in a forward to the report.

“And they are supplied as never before with lethal weapons by reckless states,” Egeland said. “Only a forceful, unambiguous and verifiable convention can control transfers and do away with the networks of illegal arms brokers that supply our generation’s weapons of mass killings and mass misery.”

Duncan said that after three years of discussions, Britain, Argentina, Australia, Costa Rica, Finland, Japan and Kenya have proposed a resolution establishing negotiations to draft and agree on a treaty.

The idea of a treaty “is still contentious,” Duncan said. But supporters are hoping the disarmament committee will support the resolution and the 192-member General Assembly will approve the measure later this year. That would pave the way for negotiations leading up to an international conference in 2012 that would hopefully adopt the new treaty.

Last year, the assembly overwhelmingly endorsed a working group to move toward negotiations by a vote of 147-2, with the U.S. and Zimbabwe casting “no” votes. Others were either absent or abstained.

Whether President Barack Obama’s administration will now back negotiations remains to be seen.

Gun control is a hotly contentious issue in the United States, where the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizens the right to “keep and bear arms,” and powerful lobby groups routinely oppose almost every effort to restrict gun sales and ownership — and usually win.

Supporters of a new treaty stress that it will not interfere with legal arms sales but will target illegal weapons transfers.

The U.S. statement to the disarmament committee, delivered Tuesday by Ellen Tauscher, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, focused on Obama’s proposals to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons and move toward disarmament. It made no mention of conventional weapons or an Arms Trade Treaty.

A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly, said the administration was still reviewing its position on a treaty.

Many countries in Europe, Africa and Latin America are backing the campaign to launch negotiations on an Arms Trade Treaty.

Nigeria’s deputy U.N. ambassador warned that the circulation of illicit weapons in west Africa “is fast turning the region into a major transit point for illicit trafficking in arms and drugs” and facilitating the growth of criminal syndicates.

Paul van den Ijssel, the Netherlands ambassador to the U.N. Conference on Disarmament in Geneva, told a forum that a strong international treaty is needed to straighten out “patchwork arrangements” in different countries and regions.

Brig. Gen. Mujahid Alam, a retired Pakistani officer with the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo, said “free and unabated trafficking of weapons, in particular small arms,” in the Great Lakes region of central Africa is one of the major causes fueling the war in Congo, which has claimed 5 million lives since 1998.

He predicted that agreement on an Arms Trade Treaty will not happen quickly and suggested that the U.N. and the international community consider a pilot project in the Great Lakes region to test possible treaty provisions to curb illegal weapons transfers.