Saturday, August 15, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
DISARMAMENT: U.N. Arms Embargoes Routinely Flouted
Thalif Deen
- As U.N. member states and armed rebel groups continue to brazenly break arms embargoes imposed by the world body, Secretary-General Kofi Annan is asking the Security Council to "name and shame" the habitual violators.
The Security Council "may wish to produce a list of individuals, corporations, groups and countries violating arms embargoes," says Annan in a report released here.
Considering the close links between the illegal trade in small arms and trafficking in women and children, "the Council may wish to assist in bringing those responsible for such crimes before the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution," he says.
Currently, seven countries are under U.N. arms embargoes – Somalia, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Iraq, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cote d’Ivoire – along with Al-Qaeda, Taliban and the Janjaweed militia in Darfur, Sudan.
But in a report to the Security Council, Annan implicitly admits that embargoes are being consistently violated both by member states and by rebel groups in the world’s battle zones.
"Member states should be called upon to enforce all (Security) Council resolutions on sanctions, including those imposing arms embargoes, in accordance with the charter of the United Nations, and to bring their own national legislation into compliance with the Council’s measures on sanctions," the report says.
Annan has urged the Security Council to pursue "more vigorously and expeditiously" the use of arms embargoes in countries or regions threatened by, engaged in, or emerging from armed conflicts.
"The Council may wish to consider coercive measures against member states that deliberately violate arms embargoes declared in respect of specific conflict areas," the report notes.
But due to political sensitivities, the secretary-general has not identified any of the violators of U.N. embargoes or proposed specific measures to punish the guilty.
"Despite the fact that there are over four U.N. committees with monitoring mechanisms," one Third World diplomat told IPS, "the Security Council has practical problems in keeping track of the violators."
In the past, the Security Council has also imposed military sanctions on several other countries, including Afghanistan, the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Haiti, Libya and South Africa (during the apartheid regime). But most of these embargoes were subsequently lifted.
Despite its flaws, embargoes are still an "important means of putting political pressure" in conflict zones, Greg Puley, policy advisor for Oxfam International, told IPS.
But the problem, he said, is in enforcement. Perhaps the United Nations should have a permanent monitoring group overseeing embargoes.
Puley admitted that embargoes are "an important tool the Security Council has to have at its disposal."
But the larger issue, he said, is to set up norms for arms transfers – particularly small arms, which are the weapons of choice in most of today’s conflicts.
One of the U.N. monitoring groups has pointed out that the arms embargo was the least transparent of the measures in the sanctions regime against Al-Qaida and the Taliban, and associated individuals and entities.
This was the hardest to implement "as the possession, manufacturing and sale of arms by states are generally seen as matters of national security."
According to information submitted by member states, there were three different aspects relating to the enforcement of arms embargoes: first, the legal measures to criminalise breaches; second, safeguards to prevent nationally produced weapons and ammunition from being diverted; and third, formulation of a normative framework to guide decisions regarding arms transfers.
The illegal flow of weapons in violation of embargoes is primarily confined to small arms – including handguns, assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers and anti-personnel landmines.
The United Nations admits that small arms are primarily responsible for most of the deaths in the ongoing conflicts in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean.
But most of the world’s major arms manufacturers are resisting attempts to create a legally binding U.N. convention that can track the weapons to their original suppliers.
Last month, a coalition of human rights and peace activists urged the United Nations to adopt a legally binding "marking and tracing system" to help track small arms from production to end-user.
The resistance by governments to a global system for tracking arms transfers has meant that "it is nearly impossible to prosecute people or hold governments accountable for illegally selling arms and breaking U.N. arms embargoes," said the report, titled "Tracing Lethal Tools."
As a result, those countries selling arms illegally can simply claim ignorance of how the weapons ever ended up in the hands of killers.
"Eight million new weapons are manufactured every year and countless crimes and atrocities are committed against civilians around the world. Yet there is precious little chance of prosecuting the perpetrators of violent crimes with no global system to prove the origin of weapons," says Rebecca Peters, director of the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA)
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DISARMAMENT: U.N. Arms Embargoes Routinely Flouted
Thalif Deen
- As U.N. member states and armed rebel groups continue to brazenly break arms embargoes imposed by the world body, Secretary-General Kofi Annan is asking the Security Council to “name and shame” the habitual violators.
(more…)
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