John Duncan

THE ARMS TRADE: LAW AND ECONOMICS

Stuck in Washington after the ASIL conference (see last post) before calls next week, and with the G20 dominating the news set me thinking about one of the questions the sceptics often ask – Why do we need a new treaty surely we just need nations to act more responsibly?

Well its true a new treaty is not going to solve the problems by itself – you can’t simply legislate for responsible behaviour. We can’t even manage that domestically.

Most countries have laws against speeding and despite all the law enforcement of  national police and courts, people still break the law. Why would we imagine that a new law would work at the international level where we don’t have anything comparable in terms of law enforcement.

Ah! say the sceptics then you admit the ATT won’t work.

No, It will work because the ATT is a more complex idea than that. It started out as an effort to tackle Human Rights and Humanitarian issues. And those are still at its heart and important reasons for taking action.

But there are perfectly good economic reasons for nations to behave responsibly. In one sense the ATT is the mechanism to allow us to focus those economic drivers.

Development: huge amounts of aid money have been spent dealing with the effects of our failure to properly regulate the arms trade. We simply can’t continue in the current financial climate to see our efforts to make progress in achieving the Millennium Development Goals undermined like this. We are going to have to regulate the arms trade much better than we have.

Industrial co-operation: many of the major arms suppliers restructured into global companies over a decade ago. The current patchwork of controls is clearly not working. Worse because the there are no common international standards it has prevented industrial cooperation and inward investment. Putting the arms trade onto a sound regulatory footing would increase confidence and gradually allow greater cooperation where the sanction for “irresponsible” behaviour would be that companies would be unwilling to co-operate, or trade with those who do not meet the international standard.

In his speech to Britain’s ambassadors last week David Miliband said that“ Economic risk needs to be addressed by a political bargain” this is very much the heart of what an ATT process entails; understanding the link between politics and economics, achieving a synergy between the moral and the self interested approach. As we have seen with the Kimberly Process, or Blood Diamonds, it is quite possible to use economic interest to produce a result that meets a moral imperative.

Posted at 01:12 30 March 2009 by John Duncan  |  Comments[5]