US waters down UN planned measures to limit small arms trafficking

An all-night session by diplomats from over 170 countries over Friday night and Saturday morning has sealed agreement at the UN in New York on an international pact to limit the trafficking of small arms. The pact is strongly supported by Ireland.

But the agreement, which is politically but not legally binding, was in the view of most delegations and human rights groups severely undermined by compromises forced by the US. These removed references to curbing private military weapon ownership and the right to sell weapons to "non-state actors", that is insurgent movements.

The plan sets out broad guidelines for national and international measures to better track and crack down on the $1 billion-a-year business of illegal trade in small arms. The United Nations says such weapons were used in 46 of 49 major conflicts since 1990, contributing to some four million deaths, 80 per cent of them women and children.

The pact urges signatories to control exports, to regulate arms producers and to compile records of sales. It calls on them to mark weapons better in order to help trace their origin. It also calls on states to destroy surplus stockpiles of such weapons and to criminalise their unlicensed production and trade. As the conference opened the US Assistant Secretary of State for Arms Control, Mr John Bolton, announced to general astonishment that the US would not back any agreement which infringed the constitutional right of US citizens to bear arms or deprived liberation movements of their ability to overthrow illegitimate rulers.

In the final talks sessions, that meant a refusal to back a text which merely called for governments "to seriously consider legal restrictions on unrestricted trade in and ownership of small arms and light weapons."

"The US should be ashamed of themselves," the South African envoy, Mr Jean Du Preez, said. "We are deeply disappointed."

African countries had been particularly keen to see measures applied to non-state participants in the civil wars that have ravaged the continent. A spokesman for Human Rights Watch, Mr Joost Hiltermann, expressed disappointment that the agreement failed to place a duty of care on legal exporters whose weapons end up in illegal hands. Most of the illegal trade starts out as legal, he said.

Mr Hiltermann also said the US stance provided political cover for the Russians, Chinese and Eastern Europeans who have flooded the developing world with weapons.

The US made one concession: it agreed to a follow-up conference no later than 2006, an idea it initially resisted.