Archive for November, 2007

Linking transparency and restraint in military exports

Posted on: November 27th, 2007 by Ernie Regehr

A year ago states decided, through a UN General Assembly resolution, to pursue”a comprehensive, legally binding instrument establishing common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms.”[i] At the same time they asked the Secretary-General to survey states for their views on the feasibility of such an Arms Trade Treaty.

The Secretary-General has now reported. The response rate was unusually high, more than 90 countries (153 voted for the resolution), and more than 90 percent of those argued that the feasibility of a treaty is evidenced by the variety of initiatives and voluntary arrangements that already exist at sectoral, multilateral, regional and sub-regional levels. Transparency was identified as essential to making control measures effective and states are looking to the forthcoming study by a Group of Governmental Experts (which will report in the autumn of 2008) to explore, among other issues, reporting procedures, related measures to verify compliance, and assistance to states in building national capacity to manage transfer controls.

It is clear that an Arms Trade Treaty will include mandatory disclosure of exports and imports to an international registry of transfers – similar to the current UN Register of Conventional Arms,[ii]except that the expected register will not be voluntary and will include all conventional arms, including small arms. In effect, under a Treaty each state party will become accountable to all others, with opportunities for all parties to the treaty to challenge each other on particular transfers deemed not to be in compliance.

Canada’s annual report on the Export of Military Goods, introduced in 1991, goes some way toward meeting likely transparency requirements – although, current reporting is certainly not a model of timeliness, the last report having been released in late 2003 reporting on 2002 exports.[iii]The report, when it is available, is extensive compared to the national reports of many countries (notwithstanding its major gap in excluding exports to the US – which is another story for another time). However, a major objective of the Treaty will be to prevent arms sales when there is a risk that they will be used in the violation of human rights, but any reliable assessment of such a risk requires considerable detail on the particular commodities sold and on the likely user – information that is not available under current reporting.

For example, the report on 2002 lists the sale of a surveillance camera system to Colombia (for $600,000) but offers no details of the context in which it is to be used and by whom. Thus there is no basis for assessing the level of risk that it will contribute to human rights violations. Aircraft have a variety of roles and functions, and since Canada is a supplier of aircraft and of components for foreign aircraft manufactures, assessments of their likely impact on human rights requires clear information on the kind of aircraft involved and their users and likely uses. The sale of $30 million in helicopters and aircraft parts to Saudi Arabia, along with $20 million in armoured vehicles, is reported without details about the end-user – but even without that, these sales, part of a series of multiyear contracts, ought to be setting off alarm bells on multiple levels.

Canada’s response to the Secretary-General’s survey[iv]affirms the centrality of transparency: “We believe that an Arms Trade Treaty will provide a transparent framework of universally applicable standards for States to follow” (para 2). Furthermore, “Canada supports inclusion of a requirement that States share information relating to the transfers that they approve or reject. A mechanism will be needed to ensure that this information is made available to all States” (para 18).

The government’s recognition of the centrality of transparency to accountability and restraint is welcome. That in turn will require the addition of considerable detail to Canadian reporting and, especially, a measure of timeliness. Reporting four years after the fact, the current pattern, may be of interest to historians but is of little use to arms controllers. Under an Arms Trade Treaty timely reporting will be the central means by which national decision-making on military exports can be shaped and constrained by agreed standards, peer scrutiny, and legal challenges – all measures to help make international human security the essential test of responsible military exports.


[i] United Nations General Assembly.2006b. Towards an arms trade treaty: establishing common international standards for the import, export and transfer of conventional arms.UN General Assembly Resolution A/Res/61/89, December 18.Available athttp://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/499/77/PDF/N0649977.pdf?OpenElement.

See the Nov 1/06 posting here (newactio).

[ii] http://disarmament.un.org/cab/register.html

[iii] Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada. 2003. Export of Military Goods from Canada: Annual Report 2002, December. http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/eicb/military/miliexport02-en.asp.

[iv] Canada’s views on ATT, Submitted Autumn ’07:

http://disarmament.un.org/UNODA_Web_Docs/CAB/ATT/Canada.pdf

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Shifting the focus on Iran’s nuclear program

Posted on: November 12th, 2007 by Ernie Regehr

Rumors of an American war on Iran continue unabated,[i] even while any case for such a war grows progressively weaker, and as a result US Vice President Dick Cheney has been making what is for him a familiar move.

Mr. Cheney is reportedly putting pressure on intelligence analysts to modify their reporting on Iran’s nuclear program to better serve the attack scenarios of Administration hawks. The refusal by some in the intelligence community to sign on to a national intelligence assessment claiming an imminent Iranian nuclear weapons capacity has held up a key intelligence report, and it may also have contributed to the removal of John Negroponte as director of national intelligence.[ii]

Obviously the international community, including Iran’s neighbors, still harbors a deep concern about Iran’s nuclear intentions, but the urgency of that concern is clearly mitigated by the conclusion of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that Iran is now providing sufficient reporting, as well as allowing sufficient access by IAEA inspectors, to enable the IAEA “to verify the non-diversion of declared nuclear material in Iran.”[iii]

That assurance doesn’t address the possibility of undeclared or clandestine programs, but here too the IAEA is making progress on a work plan[iv] that was put in place in August to resolve all the outstanding verification issues by April 2008, with a progress report due from the IAEA Director General to the IAEA Board next week.

The Bush Administration has thus been increasingly de-linking its war plans from Iran’s nuclear program, focusing instead on Iran’s alleged support for groups fighting the Americans in Iraq, a move that is making others in the Security Council more reluctant to pursue aggressive sanctions for fear of conflating the two issues (nuclear and Iraq).[v]

That reluctance is reinforced by the inescapable ambiguity of the one major Iranian nuclear controversy that remains, And it is an ambiguity that will remain even after a satisfactory completion of the Iran/IAEA work plan – namely, the uncertain legality of Iran’s ongoing enrichment of uranium.

Iran’s uranium enrichment program is no longer clandestine, it is open to inspection and verification, and it is legal under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and its related verification requirements, but it does violate UN Security Council Resolution 1737 of December 23, 2006,[vi] which requires, among other things, the suspension of “all enrichment-related and reprocessing activities, including research and development.”

Suspension is not itself the ultimate objective of the Security Council and Iran rightly argues that it has a right to pursue any nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. The suspension demand is put forward as a confidence-showing measure – that is, through the suspension Iran would demonstrate its goodwill and willingness to help the IAEA establish that there are no ongoing clandestine nuclear programs in Iran and that all declared programs are for peaceful purposes.

While the Security Council agreed on the demand that Iran suspend uranium enrichment, the international community broadly and the six states[vii] giving leadership on the Iran issues in particular are not of a single mind on what the ultimate objective should be. President George Bush is unequivocal: “Listen, the first thing that has to happen diplomatically for anything to be effective is that we all agree on the goal. And we’ve agreed on the goal, and that is the Iranians should not have a nuclear weapon, the capacity to make a nuclear weapon, or the knowledge as to how to make a nuclear weapon.”[viii]

But the American attempt to deny Iran the knowledge or even the capacity to build a nuclear weapon, rather than to ensure its full compliance with the inspections regime to confirm that Iran is not actually building a nuclear weapon, makes it easy for Iran to claim that its rights under the NPT are being violated. President Bush in the meantime repeatedly conflates the “knowledge” needed to build a nuclear weapon with the possession of one: “If you’re interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon.”[ix]

In fact, there is no reasonable prospect over the long term of preventing Iran from gaining such knowledge, and there are indications that Washington’s European and Security Council partners in dealing with Iran may now be moving on to focus on the real issue – preventing Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear weapon through a meticulously applied inspections program, rather than trying to restrict the knowledge.

That change was implied earlier this fall when the Security Council refused to authorize more sanctions in the face of Iran’s continuing uranium enrichment. Instead, the European focus was on monitoring progress in Iranian cooperation with the IAEA on clearing up questions related to its past clandestine work.[x] If the IAEA report due next week is positive and shows Iran to be genuinely cooperating on the core issue of full transparency, the uranium enrichment issue will continue to decline in importance as long as the IAEA is given access to inspect the process and confirm that it is producing only low enriched uranium for civilian reactors, and not high enriched uranium suitable for weapons production.


[i] See “War With Iran?” in this space (warwithi). Time Magazine’s October 26, 2007 issue declared, “Iran War Drumbeat Grows Louder” (http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1676826,00.html).

[ii] Gareth Porter, “Cheney Tried to Stifle Dissent in Iran NIE,” Interpress Service, November 9, 2007 (http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39978).

[iii] Statement by IAYA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei to the 62 nd Regular Session of the UN General Assembly, October 29, 2007 (http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Statements/2007/ebsp2007n018.html).

[iv] The work plan is available at the IAEA website (http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Documents/Infcircs/2007/infcirc711.pdf), and Sharon Squassoni of the Carnegie Endowment has provided a graphic depiction of the timeline for resolving outstanding issues that grew out of Iran’s clandestine nuclear activities (http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=19553&prog=zgp&proj=znpp).

[v] Robin Wright, “Divisions in Europe May Thwart U.S. Objectives on Iran,” Washington Post, October 18, 2007 (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/17/AR2007101702211.html).

[vi] http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N06/681/42/PDF/N0668142.pdf?OpenElement.

[vii] The Permanent Five of the Security Council plus Germany.

[viii] President George W. Bush, “Iran’s Nuclear Activities,”The White House, Washington, DC, April 28, 2006 (http://www.state.gov/p/nea/rls/rm/2006/65479.htm).

[ix] Paul Koring, Bush steps up rhetoric on Iran: Warns of possible ‘World War III’, The Globe and Mail, October 18, 2007 (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20071018.BUSH18/TPStory/TPInternational/America/).

[x] Sophie Walker, “World powers push ahead with Iran sanctions,” Reuters, November 2, 2007 (http://ca.today.reuters.com/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2007-11-02T203718Z_01_L30131658_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-IRAN-NUCLEAR-COL.XML).

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