Globalization has changed the arms trade. Arms companies, operating from an increasing number of locations, now source components from across the world. Their products are often assembled in countries with lax controls on where they end up. Too easily, weapons get into the wrong hands. Each year, at least a third of a million people are killed directly with conventional weapons and many more die, are injured, abused, forcibly displaced and bereaved as a result of armed violence. Rapidly widening loopholes in national controls demonstrate how this globalized trade also needs global rules. The time for an effective international Arms Trade Treaty is now.
Summary
"My country has suffered appallingly from the effects of the uncontrolled arms trade – and continues to suffer… We don’t manufacture these guns, yet they end up in our country, erode our security and have terrible consequences for our development."
- Florella Hazeley, Sierra Leone Action Network on Small Arms, 9 July 2006
Military spending has risen steadily since 1999 and is expected to overtake peak Cold War levels by the end of 2006. This is the biggest market that the global arms trade has ever had.
At the same time, the arms trade has become more ‘globalized’, with weapons assembled using components from around the world. This has exposed major loopholes in existing arms regulations that allow the supply of weapons and weapon components to embargoed destinations, to parties breaching international law in armed conflict, and to those who use them to flagrantly violate human rights.
This paper shows how the changing pattern of ownership and production since the early 1990s means that national regulations are insufficient to prevent arms from reaching the hands of abusers. Weapons are now commonly assembled from components sourced from across the globe, with no single company or country responsible for the production of all the different components. Companies themselves are also increasingly globalized, setting up offshore production facilities, foreign subsidiaries and other collaborative ventures, sometimes in countries which have few controls over where the weapons go, or to what ends they are used.
Faced with an arms industry that operates globally, governments cannot rely solely on traditional national or regional export control systems; effective control of a global arms trade requires new international standards and regulations based on international law.This paper concludes that existing arms regulations are dangerously out of date and that states must agree a legally binding international Arms Trade Treaty to address the problem.
The global arms trade provides weapons for legitimate national self-defence, peacekeeping and law enforcement, operating in accordance with international law. But, as this paper shows, it also provides arms to governments with track records of using weapons inappropriately and unlawfully against civilians in violation of international human rights law and humanitarian law. And, without adequate controls, weapons and munitions that begin in the legal arms trade can too easily pass into the hands of armed groups and those involved in organized crime.
Section 1 of this report looks at the globalization of the arms trade, including the role of traditional exporters and the emergence of significant new arms producers and exporters. Case studies throughout the report illustrate aspects of the changing industry and the inadequacy of current law to control it.
Sections 2 to 4 illustrate the changes in the arms industry in more detail – in particular the integration of components sourced from around the world, the licensing of arms production overseas and the ownership of subsidiary arms-producing companies.
Sections 5 to 8 look at the human cost and governments’ efforts to regulate the arms trade to date, and point out the inadequacies of national and regional measures.The report concludes by recommending that states work towards the introduction of a legally binding international Arms Trade Treaty.
