Governments from over 190 member states of the United Nations yesterday began meetings in an effort to find common ground on the first ever Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) and Coordinator of the Caribbean Coalition for Development and the Reduc-tion of Armed Violence (CDRAV) Folade Mutota said the countries have a second chance to make history having failed to reach an agreement last year.
The ATT is expected to control the international supply of arms and ammunition.
According to a press release from CDRAV, which is a member of the Control Arms coalition, a global coalition of non-governmental organisations campaigning for a robust treaty to save lives, in July last year member states were unable to reach agreement on the ATT after a number of countries including the USA and Russia requested more time in the final hours of negotiations.
The release said that since July, there have been indications that some of those major exporters are more open to agreeing a treaty this time around.
The draft text from July 2012 contains many of the basic elements needed to better regulate the global arms trade. However, its treatment of ammunition fails to recognise that access to ammunition is one of the major contributors to the escalating incidences of gun homicides in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the world.
Caricom governments and civil society have identified ammunition as critically important to the region’s efforts to control gun violence and are lobbying for the inclusion of ammunition in the substantive sections of the treaty.
The global trade in ammunition is estimated to be worth $US4 billion.
The Caricom Lead Negotiator is Ambassador Eden Charles, a Trinidad and Tobago diplomat posted at the Permanent Mission in New York.
Last December Chairman of the Caricom Council for National Security and Law Enforcement (CONSLE) Dr Errol Cort called on the global community to come back to the negotiating table to conclude an ATT.
Cort had expressed disappointment that a treaty was not concluded last year pointing out that such an instrument is an important foreign policy and developmental objective not only of the Caribbean Community, but other disproportionately-affected small states as well, a Caricom Secretariat press release said.
Speaking at the Third Meeting of the Caribbean-United States Security Cooperation Dialogue in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago last year, Cort said Caricom had pledged to lobby for UN Member States to return to the negotiating table. “It is our hope that all countries concerned with the illegal trafficking of arms, including our CBSI partners, will re-join these negotiations set to recommence in 2013,” he was quoted as saying.
