Arms Trade Treaty: First week round-up
Cesar Marin from Amnesty Venezuela offers our round up from the first week of Arms Trade Treaty negotiations in New York.
Our blogs are written by Amnesty International staff, volunteers and other interested individuals, to encourage debate around human rights issues. They do not necessarily represent the views of Amnesty International.
From a previous blog comment of mine with a few alterations to end on a positive note :
Looking at the tweets and blog statements at the end of the first week personally I feel underwhelmed. To get to the final day and have a load of states statements about breadth which must of already of been discussed in the preparatory talks and rediscussions of procedure is in my mind no progress. Also to have discussions concerning "goals and objectives" in the main text seems odd. Surely a treaty should be based on more concrete agreements ? We are dealing with the arms trade here not ESC rights and progressive realisation. I really hope that the issue of Palestinian statehood isn't thrown into the mix next week.
We have just had a UN global conference in Rio on development where a political statement was madly rushed together in a few days with many of the important topics omitted, producing an extremely weak set of future plans.
If these negotiations continue at the same pace in the next couple of weeks then I personally fear that we will be heading in the same direction.
Of course I may be wrong and everything is happening behind closed doors as the rest is a sideshow. In two weeks time somebody will open the door with a copy of the treaty and everybody will be heading for the exits, hopefully with a strong treaty in the bag.
This is all brazen hypocrisy. Why doesn't Amnesty put its money where its mouth is and support the UN Human Rights Commissioner's call for an arms embargo applied equally in Syria?
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