UN General Assembly passes Arms Trade Treaty (ATT)
Iran Press TV
Wed Apr 3, 2013 9:51AM GMT
The UN General Assembly has passed a treaty to regulate the multibillion-dollar international arms trade with 154 countries voting in favor of the draft resolution.
The UN on Tuesday passed the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) to regulate the international conventional weapons commerce, which was estimated at up to USD 70 billion dollars annually.
Major arms traders such as China and Russia and weapons buyers like Egypt and India were among the 23 countries abstaining while Syria, North Korea and Iran voted against the treaty over its politically-motivated stipulations.
“The right to acquire and import arms for their (importer states’) security needs is subject to the discretionary judgment and extremely subjective assessment of the exporting states. That is why this text is highly abusable and susceptible to politicization, manipulation and discrimination,” Iran’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Gholam-Hossein Dehqani said during the session.
Cuba’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations Rodolfo Reyes Rodriguez also said during the session, “This is a document that is not balanced and favors the interests of arms exporting states.”
Venezuela's ambassador to the UN Jorge Valer said the treaty did not recognize the rights of all states to acquire, produce, export, import and possess conventional weapons for security purposes.
In the final UN conference on the ATT in New York on March 28, Iran protested “legal shortcomings in the arms trade treaty which should have been corrected.”
Iranian Ambassador to the United Nations Mohammad Khazaei said that despite efforts by Iran to rectify the various legal flaws in the draft treaty within the framework of serious and constructive negotiations, the preparation of the final draft was "politically motivated" and the draft was "biased" so it is not acceptable.
He pinpointed the failure to include a ban on weapons’ sale to “aggressors” and the inclusion of certain paragraphs in favor of a number of particular governments as the main source of objection to the draft document.
The treaty applies to all conventional arms within the categories of battle tanks, armored combat vehicles, large-caliber artillery systems, combat aircraft, attack helicopters, warships, missiles and missile launchers, and small arms and light weapons, according to the draft’s text.
According to the UN Office for Disarmament Affairs, violence kills more than half a million people each year, including 66,000 women and girls. About 800 humanitarian workers were killed and nearly 700 injured in armed attacks across the world between 2000 and 2010.
MYA/PR/HJL
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