Reform of the U.S. arms export control took a major step forward this week when the Departments of State and Commerce released final rules governing aircraft and gas turbine engines. However, the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), which the Obama Administration voted to adopt at the United Nations earlier this month, …
One of the unreported stories about the negotiation of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) at the United Nations is the effort by many U.N. members, supplemented by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), to blame the failure of the first negotiating conference last July on the United States. This story demonstrates the widespread …
At noon on Wednesday, Peter Woolcott, the president of the U.N. Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), released the last draft of the treaty. The only further changes will be technical corrections: As Woolcott put it, this is a take-it-or-leave-it document. This latest draft contains a substantial number of …
The fireworks at the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) conference in New York started late on Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, the atmosphere, which had in previous days been calm, felt like last July, when the last negotiating conference collapsed into failure. The fun began with an intervention on Wednesday by …
As the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) conference moved through its third day, the isolation of the United States became ever clearer. The U.S. position is that the current text of the treaty, negotiated last July, needs to be better drafted but should not be substantially changed. Yesterday, it became …