Control Arms
Find out how you can help achieve an international Arms Trade Treaty.
What are the issues?
There are currently no legally binding, international rules regulating the arms trade. National controls are rife with gaps and loopholes, making it all too easy for weapons to end up in the hands of those who use them to abuse human rights.
This unregulated arms trade has catastrophic results:
- In an average year, small arms kill around a third of a million men, women and children - and leave hundreds of thousands more injured, disabled, traumatised and grieving
- 1000 people die each day from armed violence, and hundreds of thousands more are displaced, maimed or loose their livelihood.
This must, and can, be stopped.
What is Oxfam doing about it?
Through the Control Arms campaign which we run jointly with IANSA and Amnesty International, we are calling for a global, legally-binding Arms Trade Treaty, to control this deadly trade. Over one million people have signed our Million Faces Petition, which was presented to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in 2006. In 2008, work began in earnest on developing a treaty. We are continuing to keep the pressure on to make sure it is effective in saving lives.
How you can help
The Million Faces petition is still going strong, with hundreds of supporters adding their faces every week. Add your face at www.controlarms.org and send a message to world leaders that we need an effective ATT now.
Campaign successes so far
At the UN General Assembly in December 2006, a huge majority of 153 governments voted in favour of developing an Arms Trade Treaty. The following year, after pressure from Control Arms, over 100 governments responded to a UN Consultation on the ATT. This is an amazing success, with the potential to save millions of lives worldwide. But some governments want to weaken the treaty. We need to keep the pressure on to make sure that they don’t succeed.
