Geneva has been chosen as the host city for the permanent secretariat of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), a new convention which aims to regulate the international arms trade. Professor Keith Krause, Director of the Graduate Institute’s Centre on Conflict, Development and Peacebuilding and Programme Director of the Small Arms Survey, provided this report.

What problem is the Arms Trade Treaty designed to address?

The Treaty is intended to harmonise states’ arms export control policies and decisions to a common "floor" of standards that will - one hopes - reduce the flow of weapons to states and other actors who commit abuses against civilian populations, or violate international human rights or humanitarian law.

Prior to the Treaty, there were no universal and legally binding criteria regulating the flow of arms internationally. With the Treaty, the international community at least has some common standards, although implementing, monitoring and enforcing respect for these standards will be a big challenge.

How do you view the Treaty’s prospects for success?

The global trade in conventional weapons - everything from tanks and aircraft to small arms and ammunition - is already fairly transparent, but usually only "after the fact" - once arms and ammunition have been transferred or exported. There are of course illicit and black market transfers, but these are usually small scale, and difficult to trace. Several groups and individuals, including the Small Arms Survey, have made great strides in shining the spotlight on transfers to places such as South Sudan or Syria, but formal "state-to-state" transparency is much more limited.

So getting states to ratify the Treaty is not the main obstacle - more than 70 states have already ratified the treaty, and a further 50 have signed but not yet ratified. However, major players in the arms trade, such as Russia and China, have neither signed nor ratified, and it is not clear that they will do so in the near future. This will definitely limit the effectiveness of the Treaty.

Another issue - even for states that have ratified the treaty - is the way in which its provisions can or will be interpreted. Even within one arms exporting state, different departments (the Foreign or Economic ministries, or development agency) can have different views on whether or not a given arms transfer represents a real risk of being used to violate human rights or be diverted to irresponsible actors. So getting states to agree among themselves on such risks prior to transfers being made is a huge undertaking.

What were the deciding factors behind the choice of Geneva as host for the ATT secretariat?

Geneva already hosts a number of similar bodies (the Implementation Support Units for the Mine Ban and Cluster munitions treaties, for example), and is regarded as a hub for multilateral disarmament efforts. Most states have diplomatic representation here, and it is clear that Geneva has a critical mass of expertise and experience on conventional arms issues. So Geneva is a logical choice - even if some states would like to increase the geographic spread of such institutions into the Global South.

What contacts do you envisage between the Institute (Centre on Conflict, Development & Peacebuilding, Small Arms Survey) and the ATT secretariat?

We'll have to see what final form the Secretariat takes, but it is an official "treaty body." That being said, the Small Arms Survey has participated actively in the process leading up to the Treaty, and produced a number of key tools (model laws, implementation guides, etc.) that will be useful if the Secretariat - which will be a small entity with only a few staff - is to fulfil its role of facilitating effective implementation of the Treaty. So I am sure there will be lots of opportunities to feed into its work directly.