Cancun
Supporters of human rights treaties tend to pour a remarkable amount of energy into promoting treaty ratification, while spending remarkably little time thinking about the problems of assessing compliance and, ultimately, whether the treaty is actually working. That’s certainly been the case with advocates of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). The consequences of this modus operandi are evident here in Cancun, where the states signed onto the pact are holding their first meeting.
Don’t be misled by its title. The ATT is really a human rights treaty; it has human rights standards at its core. And like all human rights treaties, it can’t be enforced within the context of the agreement. If you and I sign a trade treaty and you cheat, I can impose tariffs on you, which incentivizes you not to cheat. If you and I agree not to build battleships and you then run off and build one, I can do likewise, which nullifies the effect of your cheating. But if you and I sign a treaty agreeing not to slap our journalists around, and you slap yours around anyhow, what am I supposed to do – retaliate by slapping mine around? Obviously not. The only way you can enforce a human rights treaty is to take action outside the context of the treaty itself.
Of course, enforcing a treaty presumes you know what it’s about in the first place. And it’s not clear that there’s much agreement on this point in Cancun. If there is one thing the treaty is not, it’s an arms control and disarmament treaty. The entire concept on which the treaty rests is that the arms trade is a legitimate business that nations engage in, above all, for purposes of national defense. Though this gives short shrift to the role (and rights) of businesses and individuals, and places dictatorships and democracies on the same plane, it’s reasonable enough on its own terms.
But you don’t have to be at Cancun long to get the sense that quite a few diplomats here (never mind the NGOs) don’t entirely grasp the point. That’s partly because a lot of the diplomats come from disarmament offices, so references to arms control pepper their speeches. Legal commentators are starting to follow suit. The U.N., too, is extremely careless with how it refers to the ATT – witness these U.N. fellowships on disarmament (including the ATT), for example. This tendency is all the more unfortunate now that the Cancun meeting has chosen Geneva, the center of the U.N.’s arms control and disarmament efforts, as the home of the ATT’s secretariat. Indeed, the ATT will likely end up sharing offices with the U.N. programs. As one delegate put it to me, the bacteria of the ATT has found a fertile home in the Geneva petri dish.
And then there is the fraught subject of gun control. Calling the ATT a gun grab is unsubtle, and I have never called it that. But the rolling display of tweets over our heads in the conference hall from the pro-treaty groups features news about domestic gun crime, and implies the ATT is relevant to stopping it. The hallway of the conference center is filled with a huge display on gun crime in Mexico, replete with the usual dubious claims about U.S. responsibility for it. Many of the leading figures in the campaign for the treaty are old-time gun controllers. And NGOs like Reaching Critical Will don’t hesitate to claim that “good practices on regulations of the possession of firearms and human rights” are among the human rights standards implied by the treaty. There is, in short, a persistent, though not deafening, gun control noise surrounding the ATT, and a sense that, if the NGOs had their way, the treaty would head sharply in that direction.
Even more annoying, though, is the general disinterest in the fact that the basic problem with the arms trade isn’t a lack of standards for who gets to buy tanks. It’s that about half the nations in this hall don’t have the administrative capacity to enforce any standards at all, to control their borders, or indeed to do much else. And then, of course, there are the many nations – including a few in attendance at Cancun – that actively and corruptly connive in the arms trade, or deliberately sell arms to other dictatorships, terrorists, and the like.
What the incapable nations need isn’t a treaty: it’s free market capitalism. That’s the only way they can hope to become rich enough to pay for competent governance. And what all of them need is democracy – hardly a cure-all, but better than the alternatives. But these are hard days for democracy promotion, and progressive NGOs are a good deal more comfortable with top-down treaties and calling for more foreign aid—spiced with a dash of left-wing authoritarianism when it comes to firearms—than they are with capitalism, or with calling out the bad guys.
I had to chuckle, for example, when I read this piece by a leading ATT advocate, which blames “today’s globalized environment” for supplying surface to air missiles to the Ukrainian rebels who shot down MH-17 last summer. Is it really all that hard to blame Russia in general, or Vladimir Putin in particular? Apparently it is.
But what is really left unsaid by the treaty advocates is how they’ll know if the treaty is working. Unless they care to confess to epic unseriousness, it can’t just be that a nation has ratified the treaty. It can’t be that a nation has the right laws and administrative systems on paper (though that is one of the two “Indicators of Success” for the Control Arms Coalition). It can’t be that the volume of conflict goes down – because, though arms controllers have never grasped this point, wars are caused by ideological rivalries and clashes of national interest, not arms.
It certainly can’t be that fewer arms are bought and sold in the world – because, if the treaty does succeed in clamping down on the illicit trade (it won’t, but bear with me), that illicit trade might be replaced in part by legal trade. In other words, if the treaty works, it might cause reported arms sales to go up – though I doubt most of its advocates would regard that as a success.
And it can’t be because the treaty advocates plan to review all arms transfers in the world for treaty compliance. The advocates place a lot of emphasis on the value of public reporting of arms transfers, and I agree with them about this. But right now, Control Arms has a total of one very-overtaxed guy working full time on their annual ATT Monitor. Even if many more hands come on board, there is no way they are going to be able to do the job – and that assumes national reporting is full and accurate and the advocates reviewing the reports are knowledgeable and unbiased. Those are both extremely unsafe assumptions.
The best any outsider can do is case studies. That’s not valueless, but it falls far short of deserving the name of a compliance and verification mechanism. And it raises, again, the problem of NGO bias. The cases the NGOs pick will tend to be the ones that get the most attention, and the ones for which the most documentation is available. And that means they are mostly going to be cases involving the democracies, and especially the U.S., which is more open about its arms transfer policies and practices than virtually anyone else. The NGOs are unlikely to beat up on the authoritarians, who don’t have a free press, don’t publish much, and who certainly won’t accede to the ATT if the NGOs really use it against them – a consideration that will further incentivize the NGOs to indulge their natural instinct to blame the U.S.
One of the surest ways to fail is not to have meaningful standards for success. And after a process of campaigning and negotiation that is now entering its third decade, the ATT is no closer to having those standards than it was at the start.
Read Ted R. Bromund’s previous dispatches from Cancun here and here. Bromund is the senior research fellow in Anglo-American relations at the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom.
