Last July negotiations on the Arms Trade Treaty ended without a result. Some countries needed more time to go through the details of the Treaty. Now we will continuethe work on the basis of the fairly strong draft treaty which the cklear majority of states were ready to adopt already last year. The conference will start again on Monday 18th of March at the UN in New York, to where I am flying today.The Conference aims at a comprehensive and legally binding Arms Trade Treaty to regulate the international trade in conventional arms. The ATT is to contain strong commitments to human rights and international humanitarian law in the export of arms. The treaty would have impact on reducing arms trafficking. This is why it is of utmost importance. We expressed our shared views with my colleagues Enrique Castillo Barrantes from Costa Rica and Héctor Timerman from Argentina in Financial Times on Friday (16th of March): http://m.ft.com/cms/s/0/03fe5d6c-8b33-11e2-8fcf-00144feabdc0.htmlWe cannot solve all details during the nine-day-conference. We must, however, solve enough of them in order to have a clear text that can be adopted and implemented. Our efforts to do this have been going on for seven years. Finland, as one of the seven initiating countries, has participated in the preparations for the ATT since 2006. It is high time we showed political will in order to finalize the Treaty – we owe it to ourselves and to the victims of armed conflicts and human rights violations, suffering from unregulated arms trade
17.3.2013
