Beltway insiders yawned at the progress of the United Nations' Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), the first treaty to regulate the massive global trade in conventional weapons that are responsible for most conflict deaths worldwide, from its near death in the summer of 2012 to its Easter-week resurrection and General Assembly passage. But if you're interested in international regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, financial transactions, nuclear weapons or the Internet -- or if you're opposed to any and all regulation and want to know how the United States can stave it off -- then consider the Curious Case of the Idea that Wouldn't Die.
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The ATT is the child of a 1990s observation -- that the civilian carnage of developing-country violence sprang not just from ideological conflict or ineffable ethnic hatreds, but from a globalized trade in black- or grey-market small arms -- married to organizing techniques of the information age. Its passage is the revenge of the much-maligned "clicktivist," the middle powers that use the United Nations as a power-multiplier, and the Nobel Peace laureates who led the charge. In some small way, it is also the U.N. system's revenge on John Bolton, who worked so tirelessly to discredit the ATT and the U.N. system in general. Finally, it is a testament to the oldest, least trendy trick in the advocacy playbook: what Suzanne Nossel, executive director of PEN America, who worked for the treaty's passage both at Amnesty International USA and at the U.S. Department of State, calls "a determined group from civil society waging the long war."
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, rights campaigners identified a troubling trend: Where small arms move cheaply and unaccountably, conflict with devastating civilian consequences tends to follow. (Think Libyan weapons flooding into Mali.) According to Amnesty International, roughly 60 percent of documented human rights violations involve the use of small arms. In Colombia, nine out of 10 civilian victims of internal strife are killed with small arms. A French parliamentary inquiry concluded that even in Rwanda in 1994, where the vast majority of genocide victims were killed with agricultural tools, it was vast shipments of conventional weapons that emboldened the perpetrators to launch the mass killing.
By 1993, concern about the effects of the arms trade had grown strong enough that members of both the European Union and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe made non-legally-binding commitments to trade arms responsibly and with consideration for human rights.
Brian Wood, now Amnesty International's manager of arms control, security trade and human rights, recalls that making those commitments legally-binding "was an idea that seemed obvious to four of us in an Amnesty International room in 1993, looking at examples of the arms trade contributing to very serious human rights violations." But how to transform that intuitive idea into 154 "yes" votes on the floor of the United Nations had Wood and other advocates tearing their hair out for years.
Wood recalls getting lawyers from Oxford and Cambridge Universities to write up a treaty text and then promoting it around the European Union. They found a champion in former Costa Rican president, Nobel laureate, and peace activist Oscar Arias, who invited them to present the draft treaty to a convention of Nobel peace prize winners, including former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, chief U.N. arms inspector Richard Butler, and the American Friends Service Committee, a Quaker lobbying organization. (Note to funders: please don't assume this is a replicable strategy!)
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