The Scope and Implications of a Tracing Mechanism for Small Arms ...

a. From a geographical point of view, traceability cannot be truly effective
as a tool to combat international trafficking, unless it is applied
worldwide. Arms traffickers ignore regional borders—they are in fact
quite ingenious in their efforts to find loopholes in the systems that
attempt to thwart their activities, and tend to operate via the States or
regions that have the most lax regulation. In spite of this, to date many
States have not yet ratified any of the Conventions examined here, in
some cases simply because they do not belong to a region that has
sought access to such a Convention;
b. In view of the weapons concerned, traceability must cover all SALW,
ammunition and explosives, given that they all have the potential to be
misused. It is paradoxical that ammunition and explosives are the least
regulated with respect to tracing, and yet they are probably the most
strategic of the elements. This is certainly the case with explosives in
the context of terrorism, just as it is the case with ammunition in
conflict prevention (since firearms are usually abundant in areas of
tension, acting on the supply of ammunition, which is perishable and
difficult to move, seems to be more effective in the short term).
Furthermore, we note that the field of application of the different
mechanisms is disparate. The UN Programme of Action is the only
mechanism that appears to cover all weapons, ammunition and
explosives, but the issue of which weapons are covered has in fact not
been completely resolved. Of the other mechanisms studied, we note
that their fields of application are mutually exclusive: four of them
concern only firearms (and these differ 52 with respect to the kinds of
firearms they cover), while the two others deal only with explosives
and/or ammunition. 53 However, if the goal is to have synergies among
the existing mechanisms, it is essential that their fields of application
become more harmonized. If this harmonization is “top-down”
(according to the narrowest definition) rather than “bottom-up”, then
no weapons would be covered, as we have just seen. The answer is to
level off the field by applying the widest coverage, which is politically
complicated given that it implies renegotiating each mechanism;
c. Unfortunately, the situation is the same with respect to the multitude
of concrete aspects relative to marking, national records and tracing
operations. To take only one example, the State parties to the OAS
Convention have difficulty registering imported weapons because of
the very disparate types of markings they bear. 54 We therefore arrive
at the same conclusion as in the preceding point: looking for synergies
obviously makes sense, but in order to do so it is indispensable to have
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