The Hindu Business Line : Govts urged to start work on Arms Trade Treaty

The facts presented on Wednesday at a rally in the Capital to control arms and regulate arms trade speak for themselves. Over 500,000 people are killed of gun violence worldwide every year, 80 per cent of which are women and children. Almost 12 Indians succumb to gun shot wounds every day. There are 70-100 million AK47s in circulation worldwide and 40 million firearms in circulation in India alone. The United Nations (UN) too has accepted these facts.

Today the world has become a battleground with the increasing number of brutal terrorist onslaughts as well as murders for reasons as petty as family feuds. Adding fuel to fire is the easy availability of dangerous firearms like the AK47, which are being openly used to spread terror and victimise innocent civilians.

In the face of such growing atrocities organisations such as Oxfam, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), South Asia Small Arms Network (SASA-Net) and the Control Arms Foundation of India have come together to observe September 13 as the Global Day of Action on Control Arms campaign through a march, appealing to the Government of India to sign an Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which demands regulation on arms trade on an international level.

"We are calling on all the Governments of the world meeting at the UN General Assembly in October 2006, to start work on a global Arms Trade Treaty based on fundamental principles of international law, including international human rights and humanitarian law," said Ms Binalakshmi Nepram Mentschel, South Asia Advisor on Control Arms Policy, Oxfam. Already over 50 countries including much of Africa, Latin America and Europe have publicly stated their support for an ATT, she added.

Plugging loopholes

Ms Mentschel says that the idea is to stop illegal possession of arms and also the easy availability of arms due to the various loopholes in the arms laws so that mindless killings of hundreds of people are stopped. Explaining further, she says that because of such inherent loopholes, arms licences acquired in Nagaland are easily sold in States such as Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. "Five thousand Naga gun licences have been found in Uttar Pradesh alone, recently," she added. The treaty demands greater responsibility on the part of the Governments of the countries before an arms deal is struck, including import, export, transit, transhipment and brokering of arms. Second, it demands that States should not authorise transfers of arms or ammunition that violate their expressed obligations under international laws. It also asks for greater transparency on the records of the transaction of arms to be submitted annually to an international body, as well as to authorise weapons only if the likely use of it will not be for causing harm to citizens.

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