* Countries could vote on Friday on arms trade treaty
* Global weapons market valued at more than $60 billion
* Month-long U.N. talks plagued by procedural bickering
UNITED NATIONS, July 24 (Reuters) - The first draft of a
U.N. treaty to regulate the $60 billion global arms trade was
slammed on Tuesday by activists as having "more holes than a
leaky bucket" as negotiators scramble to reach a consensus by
Friday.
One person every minute dies from armed violence around the
world, and arms control activists say a convention is needed to
prevent illicitly traded guns from pouring into conflict zones
and fueling wars and atrocities. Conflicts in Syria and
elsewhere show a treaty is necessary, they add.
"Our concern with this text is that at the moment it has
more holes than a leaky bucket," Anna Macdonald, head of arms
control at Oxfam, told reporters. "And if these holes are not
closed we won't end up with a treaty that saves lives."
After losing the first week of the month-long negotiations
to procedural wrangling, delegations from around the world now
only have three days left to work on the delayed draft text
before a possible vote. The treaty must be approved unanimously,
so any one country can effectively veto a deal.
But if a consensus cannot be reached, the treaty may not be
doomed. Activists have said nations supporting a stronger pact
could then bring a treaty to the 193-nation U.N. General
Assembly and adopt it with a two-thirds majority vote.
"The text that leaves this conference must not be the text
with these loopholes. It's got to be a decent text even if it
goes back to the General Assembly," said Brian Wood, arms
control and human rights manager at Amnesty International.
The draft treaty currently says that it would only come into
effect after it has been ratified by 65 countries, which some
activists say could take up to 10 years. Arms control
campaigners say only 30 ratifications should be needed.
"Every major element ... has major loopholes," said Peter
Herby, head of the International Committee for the Red Cross
arms unit. "There is a very high risk this treaty will simply
ratify the status quo, rather than changing the status quo."
"Rather than producing the highest possible international
standards for the transfer of all conventional weapons, it would
allow many countries to simply continue doing what they're
doing," Herby said.
"BUSINESS AS USUAL"
While most U.N. member states favor a strong treaty,
activists said they were at times being drowned out in
negotiations by objections and disruptions from a minority of
states including Syria, North Korea, Iran, Egypt and Algeria.
There are divisions on key issues, such as whether human
rights should be a mandatory criterion for determining whether
governments should permit weapons exports to specific countries.
Herby said the draft references to humanitarian law were
"unlikely to make a great deal of difference in practice."
Macdonald listed several criticisms. He said the range of
weapons in the draft treaty needed to be expanded, particularly
to include ammunition; the rules governing risk assessments that
countries must do before authorizing an arms sale needed to be
tightened; and the whole treaty needed to be broadened to cover
the entire global arms trade and not just illicit transactions.
The Conflict Awareness Project said that when it came to
regulating arms brokers the draft treaty was "so weak and
watered down it will give comfort to illicit gun runners."
"The feeble treaty language means business as usual for
traffickers who are filling the arsenals of the world's worst
human rights abusers," said Kathi Lynn Austin of the Conflict
Awareness Project.
The negotiations on the treaty in New York were delayed for
the first week by a dispute over Palestinian participation,
which was eventually resolved by allowing the delegation to sit
at the front of the negotiating hall but without the right to
participate as states with voting rights.
Such procedural bickering was typical of the arms trade
talks, diplomats say, as countries that would prefer not to have
a strong treaty tried to prevent the negotiations from moving
forward. In February, preparatory talks on the rules nearly
collapsed due to procedural wrangling and other disagreements.
One of the reasons this month's negotiations are taking
place is that the United States, the world's biggest arms trader
accounting for over 40 percent of global conventional arms
transfers, reversed U.S. policy on the issue after Barack Obama
became president and decided in 2009 to support a treaty.
But U.S. officials say Washington insisted in February on
having the ability to "veto a weak treaty" during this month's
talks, if necessary. It also seeks to protect U.S. domestic
rights to bear arms -- a sensitive issue in the United States.
The other five top arms suppliers are Britain, China,
France, Germany and Russia.