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http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/new...-13T021055Z_01_HO307805_RTRUKOC_0_ARMS-UN.xml
http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/new...-13T021055Z_01_HO307805_RTRUKOC_0_ARMS-UN.xml
UN arms plan misses mark, anti-gun network says
Wed Jul 13, 2005 3:11 AM BST
By Irwin Arieff
UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - A 4-year-old crackdown on the illegal global trade in small arms has had little impact on the uncontrolled availability of pistols, rifles and machine guns in many parts of the world, a coalition of arms control groups reported on Tuesday.
While world governments have now had the time to meet the legal, procedural and program obligations set out in a 2001 U.N. action plan on small arms, "we are very disappointed by how little has been achieved," said Paul Eavis of London-based Safer World.
"In 2005 we are still saying very much that the glass is still 95 percent empty for most countries of the world," said Eavis, speaking on behalf of the International Action Network on Small Arms, a network of more than 600 organizations.
While there has been significant progress in some regions since 2001, "hundreds of thousands more people have been killed by gunshot wounds and the scale of interventions to try to tackle the problem are nowhere near sufficient," he said.
The network's latest 320-page progress report on more than 180 countries was issued on the second day of a weeklong U.N. conference convened to assess the action plan's effectiveness.
Governments attending the conference say it will take them a few more years to decide whether the plan needs rewriting or just better implementation.
At the United Nations, the term "small arms" applies to a range of weapons from pistols and rifles to military-style machine guns, small mortars and portable anti-tank systems.
Network representatives told a news conference at U.N. headquarters that the Americas and Europe were making the most progress in carrying out the 2001 plan.
There was also good progress in the Horn of Africa and central Africa's Great Lakes region, where states had joined together to attack the problem on a regional basis.
But there was "very little progress" in South Asia, North Africa and the Middle East, Eavis said.
Only about half the world's governments have set out clear standards and procedures for the management of small arms stockpiles by now. Fifty countries require that small arms be marked as they are manufactured so they can later be traced in the event they slip into the illegal arms market.
Since 2001, 36 states have destroyed at least some of their surplus small arms, and 65 have conducted some sort of disarmament program, whether in the form of voluntary weapons collection, forcible disarmament or amnesty, the report said.