MISSING PIECES - Inter-Parliamentary Union

MISSING PIECES
• the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Best
Practice Guide on National Control of Brokering Activities of 2003; 32 and
• the Nairobi Protocol of April 2004. 33
The strongest criteria are offered by the regrettably non-binding model
regulations on brokering promulgated in late 2003 by the Organisation of
American States (OAS), which prohibit brokering activities that will or
threaten to lead to genocide or crimes against humanity, violations of human
rights or international law, war crimes, the violation of UN Security Council
embargoes, or similar sanctions, among other criteria. 34
At the global level, the UN Firearms Protocol contains a recommendation
to ‘consider’ establishing a system of regulation of arms brokering,
including registration, licensing, and/or disclosure of brokering detail on
import and export licence applications (Article 15). In 2005, four years after
the Programme of Action had called for the development of ‘common
understandings’ of issues surrounding brokering, the UN General Assembly
finally agreed to establish a Group of Governmental Experts (GGE) to
further examine this issue. This is inexcusably slow, as such a GGE will not
be empowered to start negotiating an actual instrument on this issue. In
the meantime parliamentarians can be active in establishing the highest
national standards so that when global action is agreed, various nations
have strong frameworks to bring into the negotiations. NGOs continue to
call for a binding treaty on arms brokering that would close the legal gaps
and make brokered deals subject to scrutiny on the basis of human rights
and IHL criteria. 35
6. End-user controls
A linchpin of well-functioning government arms export controls is the
so-called end-user certificate (EUC). This is a document that identifies
the purported client for an arms deal and contains certain commitments
regarding how the requested guns will be used and/or whether they may
be retransferred. Thorough end-use monitoring can ensure that weapons
are only exported to appropriate destinations, that they are duly received
by the authorised recipients, that they are used appropriately once delivered,
and that they are not then forwarded to unauthorised parties.
Unfortunately, the widespread problem of falsified and fraudulent EUCs
undermines the integrity of end-use controls. Illicit arms brokers commonly
make or obtain improper EUCs that they use to arrange shipments
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