BERKELEY, California - June 27 - This week the UN is meeting in New York to review controls on the illicit arms trade that supplies terrorists and human rights abusers around the world. This conference will review an agreement that was established at the 2001 UN Small Arms Conference, and was the first global initiative on the illegal trade in small arms and light weapons. Calls for stronger regulation have been especially urgent from advocates familiar with conditions in regions that are most heavily impacted by protracted armed conflict, like Sudan. However, there has been concern that the U.S. will block progress and be unwilling to compromise on key issues.

According to Laura Reinhard, Associate Program Director for the Peace Education Fund, “these weapons kill a thousand people around the world every single day. It’s critical that the U.S. step up and help strengthen the UN agreement on arms trafficking.”

Referred to by UN Secretary General Kofi Annan as the “real weapons of mass destruction,” these small and simple to use weapons were used in the Rwandan and Bosnian genocides, and are now being used in the Darfur genocide.

The global surplus in guns, coupled with a lack of adequate trade regulations, makes war astonishingly cheap. In some parts of Africa, an AK-47 assault rifle can be bought for $6, or traded for a chicken. And when armies run out of able-bodied adults before they run out of guns, they force children to fight in their place. There are an estimated 300,000 children fighting in the world’s conflicts.

The U.S. has had a good record on implementing the Program of Action, the agreement established at the UN Small Arms Conference in 2001. However, many supporters of the agreement fear that the U.S. State Department will disrupt progress at this week’s conference by repeating its performance from 2001, when it raised objections to making a regular review conference mandatory and making the agreement legally binding.

“The lack of international controls on the arms trade makes it easy for gunrunners to make a killing off of human suffering,” said Reinhard. “Through their activities, weapons made in the USA have ended up in the hands of Al-Qaeda members. Large U.S. shipments of weapons have been diverted to unknown destinations. The U.S. must act now to make life harder for arms dealers and save lives.”

For more information, visit www.PeaceEducationFund.org

###