UN: A four-year-old crackdown on the illegal global trade in small arms has had little impact on the uncontrolled availability of pistols, rifles and machine guns in many parts of the world, a coalition of arms control groups reported on Tuesday.
While world governments have had time to meet legal, procedural and programme obligations set out in a 2001 UN action plan on small arms, Paul Eavis of London-based Safer World said, "We are very disappointed by how little has been achieved.
"In 2005 . . . the glass is still 95 per cent empty for most countries of the world," said Mr Eavis, speaking on behalf of the International Action Network on Small Arms, a group of over 600 organisations.
While there has been significant progress in some regions since 2001, "hundreds of thousands more people have been killed by gunshot wounds, and the scale of interventions to try to tackle the problem are nowhere near sufficient," he said.
The network's 320-page progress report on over 180 countries came on day two of a week-long UN conference to assess the action plan's effectiveness.
Network representatives told a news conference at UN headquarters the Americas and Europe were making the most progress in carrying out the 2001 plan.
There was also good progress in the Horn of Africa and central Africa's Great Lakes region.
But there was "very little progress" in South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, Eavis said.