A new United Nations agreement to track trade in arms is attacked on Thursday as toothless and riddled with loopholes by human rights groups which have seen a copy of the secret deal.
The agreement, to be discussed at the UN on Thursday, excludes ammunition, shells and explosives. Omitting explosives from the deal is particularly pertinent in light of the London bombings, critics said.
Spent ammunition and traces of explosives are often the only clue investigators have at the scene of an atrocity, Oxfam, Amnesty, and the International Action Network on Small Arms say in a joint statement released on Thursday.
It is vital that ammunition shipments are also marked so they can be traced. Excluding it from the agreement will help traffickers and killers evade justice, they say.
They add that failure to agree a legally binding system to track weapons means unscrupulous arms dealers will continue to get away with selling weapons to serious human rights abusers and war criminals without being traced.
The agreement was negotiated behind closed doors and will be publicly debated for the first time on Thursday. A legally binding agreement was blocked by just a few countries, notably the United States, Iran, and Egypt.
The agreement sets up a voluntary system to record the serial numbers of small arms and light weapons — but not ammunition or explosives — when they are sold or transferred between countries.
In another loophole, the agreement allows any country to refuse to disclose information about arms sales on the grounds of ”national security”.
The human rights groups say this will be used as a convenient excuse by those selling arms to oppressive regimes.
Last year, at the scene of a massacre in Gatumba, Burundi, in which 150 people were killed, spent cartridges showed that ammunition used in the attack was manufactured in China, Bulgaria and Serbia.
However, the lack of any tracing mechanism meant it was impossible to prove how it got there, they say.
”There is more likelihood of being able to trace a missing suitcase than machine gun bullets,” said Anna MacDonald, Oxfam’s campaigns director. – Guardian Unlimited Â