Examination of Witnesses (Questions 160-179)
ROY ISBISTER
AND DR
DAN PLESCH
28 JANUARY 2009
Q160 Andrew Mackinlay: So you
have traditional arms and weapons of mass destruction and chemical
and biological weaponry. Presumably, once you have the template
or the brand, a lot of things today can be done under licence—both
ordnance and weapons themselves?
Dr. Plesch: The short answer is
that it depends on the type of system. It is not as easy as one
might think. It depends on the system. Taking something as simple
as an ammunition factory for small arms, while some of the main
chemicals are cordite, which is our standard industrial production,
if you start looking at detonators and the precursor chemicals
with the detonators in the bullet, some of those chemicals are
somewhat rarer. So even there attention to detail can take you
further than you might think.
Andrew Mackinlay: Thank you.
Q161 Chairman: May I return to
something that you said, Mr. Isbister? You referred to the European
Union having a more rigorous regime than you would get with an
arms trade treaty. As I understand it, quite a debate is going
on between the EU collective position and some other states on
the nature of the ATT. The EU countries—presumably the UK
is playing a significant role—want explicit references to
issues such as human rights law and international humanitarian
law. In your assessment, what will be the outcome of those discussions?
Will the treaty be narrowly focused, or will it include wider
issues such as humanitarian law?
Roy Isbister: If it is a narrowly
focused treaty in the way that you have described, it will be
a failure. If the protections of human rights and international
humanitarian law are not included, it will be a failure. We need
those elements. A debate is going on now. The debate on international
humanitarian law is easier to win than the human rights debate.
In general, more states are comfortable with the international
humanitarian law side than with human rights. The open-ended working
group of the UN on the ATT will have its first substantive session
on 2 March. This is one of the hot topics that will be debated.
Chairman: No doubt we will get further
information from the Government in due course on the outcome of
that.
Q162 Mr. Moss: Can the open-ended
working group that is due to start meeting be an effective mechanism
for advancing the negotiations on the ATT? Will it help or hinder
those negotiations that the consensus approach seems to have been
replaced by the overwhelming majority approach, which the US is
strongly against?
Dr. Plesch: We do not quite know
what the US position will be now. Susan Rice is making positive
noises. The first technical meeting of the group has taken place
and a large number of states attended—getting on for 140
if I remember correctly. The debate about the chair was very useful.
There is a dilemma with the consensus rule.
As we mentioned in respect of India and nuclear weapons, if key
states are left out, there can be negative unintended consequences.
On the other hand, you must ensure that you get momentum. It has
been reassuring that the doctrine of the General Assembly principles
has more or less been adopted as a means of advancing the process.
That at least means that the process cannot be stopped in its
tracks for ever because of one state.
Roy Isbister: On what has been
said about the US, an organisational meeting was held last week.
This was a one-dayer to choose the chair and to set the rules
of procedure. The debate was left open on whether the group should
operate under consensus or majority decision. The General Assembly
rules, under which the open-ended working group was convened,
are for majority decisions. The US said that it had a preference
for consensus. However, it talked about rule 104 of the annexe
of something-or-other, which says that in the last resort there
can be a majority decision, but that the reservations of states
should be recorded. That is an encouraging shift in the US position,
which is all to the good.
The open-ended working group should not be considered
in isolation. Other things are going on during the course of the
year. The open-ended working group is tasked in 2009 with looking
at the areas closest to consensus and so will deal with the easy
tasks or low-hanging fruit of what can be agreed. At the same
time, the United Nations Institute for Disarmament Research will
be running a series of EU-funded regional meetings around the
world, getting regional perspectives on the issue. I anticipate
that some of those meetings could be a bit more progressive and
faster moving than the open-ended working group and could then
feed back into the process. Of course there will be the P5, the
G20, all kinds of bilateral discussions, the EU, the Troika meetings
and so on, in all of which progress can hopefully be made and
fed back into the UN process.
Q163 Mr. Moss: Both of you alluded
to a slight shift in the position of the US. Would you like to
say more about that? Will you give the Committee an idea of how
far the new Administration of President Obama might go on that?
Would a major shift in the US position have a knock-on effect
on other abstainers, such as China and Russia?
Roy Isbister: Dan might know more
than I do, but it is very early to say what that shift will be.
What Susan Rice has said is encouraging, as is the position in
the open-ended working group organisational meeting, and we have
seen some encouraging statements on small arms issues from President
Obama, so the signs are good. In terms of a knock-on effect, certainly
if you have the main exporter falling into line then everybody
will have to reassess their relationship to the process. Obviously,
some of the other more sceptical states have their own issues
that are not US issues, but I think that most of the ones that
I am aware of can be addressed.
Dr. Plesch: I do not think that
anyone should predict too much at this stage. However, in a related
area, I noticed that within days the US submitted instruments
of ratification for four amendments to the agreement on certain
conventional weapons, which had been sitting on hold for a very
considerable period of time in the last Administration, and then
moved very quickly to deposit those instruments. That says an
awful lot about changing the mood in the diplomatic community
and among the specialists. If the Administration can get their
act together to move that quickly on what one might argue is a
very obscure issue for most people and not exactly a high priority,
I think that we will get a very high level of determination and
professionalism, which we may not always like, and serious engagement
with these processes such as we have not seen for at least a decade.
Q164 Sandra Osborne: You sounded
optimistic about getting agreement on majority voting. Some of
us are just back from the UN in Geneva, where it was clear that
many aspects of the negotiations on disarmament and non-proliferation
have been talked about every week for years and the conversations
never seem to move forward. It was suggested to us by some journalists
that the frustration about never getting anywhere resulted in
an alternative group on land mines and cluster bombs being set
up, and that civil society, rather than the conference itself,
had been instrumental in that. What are your views on that? Is
the same thing likely to happen with the arms trade treaty?
Dr. Plesch: It may. There is a
change of climate, but one does not know how long it will last.
We have seen this before. For example, the Clinton Administration
boded well before they were crippled by the Republican majority
in Congress. Clearly, global citizenship—civil society in
all its forms—had a huge part to play in the landmines convention.
I can recall being in groups discussing the development of work
on land mines, and, a few years later, on small arms. The received
wisdom was, "This is completely unrealistic: you can't do
anything about land mines; don't even try." After land mines,
the same thing was said about small arms. The message I would
try to convey is that these measures, particularly the effort
on small arms and the ATT, have been carried forward in a very
hostile political environment, with the deterioration of relations
with the Russians and a poor view of these matters generally in
Washington. If we have been able to get that level of progress
in these areas over those years, how much more should we be prepared
to try to achieve in a better climate? Now, it behoves us not
to sit around waiting, but to think about how to maximise this
moment, particularly bearing in mind some of the negative economic
developments, which will last for some years to come, at a minimum.
Roy Isbister: If I can follow
up on that looking specifically at the ATT and the progress that
we have made in the past four years, if you had asked me this
time four years ago where we would be now, I would not have said
that we would be this far on. Given that we have made progress
and are still making progress, it would be remiss to suggest that
we should move outside a UN formula at this stage. The process
is still going forward and we are foursquare behind it, and we
will continue to support it for as long as we can make progress.
Q165 Mr. Horam: My colleague,
Sandra Osborne, was referring to the Conference on Disarmament,
where nothing much has happened for 13 years. One of the points
made to us in Geneva and Vienna was that the international non-governmental
organisations—I am not talking about yours in particular—seem
to have switched their attention from the big disarmament issues,
perhaps in favour of things like climate change, which has taken
over the topical fashion. Some organisations, such as the Conference
on Disarmament, would welcome more interest from NGOs and would
welcome NGOs in the negotiating chamber, where they are not allowed
at present, whereas the human rights organisations do allow them.
How do you react to that?
Dr. Plesch: There has been a great
falling off in public and political interest in arms control and
disarmament. After the cold war, people generally thought that
the job had been done; they are starting now to realise that it
has not been completed and that a job half done is a dangerous
place to leave it. We are not in a position to conjure up virtual
NGOs, but there is a crying need for much greater public awareness.
I find it odd that you can say anywhere in this
country that you are engaged or believe that we should change
the world's climate and that that can be done, but if you start
talking about world or international disarmament, people look
at you as though you are rather strange. Actually, that is very
unhistorical because for most of the last century—except
when we were actually killing each other—disarmament held
central stage in international politics. At the end of the cold
war, no one would have predicted, "Well, one thing that will
happen afterwards is we'll stop bothering about doing disarmament
any more." People would have assumed that we would have the
gumption to get on and finish the job.
Q166 Mr. Horam: Is there anything
that you would like to add, Mr. Isbister?
Roy Isbister: No, not really.
Mr. Horam: Yours is a campaign organisation
in this field.
Roy Isbister: We are not a public
campaigning organisation.[3]
We are not an Amnesty or an Oxfam,[4]
with a large public membership that campaigns, but we do advocate
for change.
Q167 Mr. Horam: Do you get funds
from the UK Government?
Roy Isbister: Yes.
Q168 Mr. Horam: Do you think that
that is acceptable? Are you quite happy with that?
Roy Isbister: The relationship
is constantly evolving in that we set our agenda of change that
we would like to see, and then we take that to people who might
be willing to fund it. Obviously, the UK Government have their
agenda, so we have to keep our integrity and stick to our guns
about what we are promoting.
Chairman: That is perhaps not the best
phrase to use in this context.
Q169 Mr. Horam: Our job is to
have a running critique of UK Government policy in this foreign
policy area. From your point of view, how should the UK Government
handle situations such as financing groups such as yours, or initiatives
funded by groups such as yours?
Roy Isbister: One of the things
that they need to do is to be fully transparent. I am not sure
how transparent it is at their end, but there is full transparency
at our end. That is the key. With transparency comes accountability.
If people want to raise the issue of the way we are working and
what we are doing, we are quite happy to engage in that debate.
We do not go solely to the UK Government or other Governments;
we get money from foundations and we have some private supporters.
We retain our editorial independence.
Q170 Mr. Purchase: Thinking of
the EU and NATO dimensions, how do you rate the performance of
the EU and its member states in terms of support for the arms
trade treaty?
Secondly, given that NATO has in recent years
been considerably constrained in saying anything at all about
the nuclear question in particular, do you think a change of American
Government might cause NATO to reassess its position, break its
silence and be a little more forthcoming?
Given that there is a considerable overlap with
your membership in NATO and the EU, are they going to be replicating
one another's work? Is it a recipe for argument and dissent? Will
it have a positive bearing on the negotiations and how big could
the EU become in this whole process?
Dr. Plesch: Are we just talking
about the ATT or can we take it a little broader?
Mr. Purchase: You can take it a bit broader
but I am looking at the ATT, although I understand that there
is a broader dimension.
Dr. Plesch: NATO, in a sense,
has to rediscover that political arms control dimension.
Q171 Mr. Purchase: Is that the
same as backbone?
Dr. Plesch: Going back to the
'60s, with the Harmel report, NATO decided that it needed to have
a political arms control dimension alongside its military arm.
Over the past eight or 10 years, that has been very much sidelined,
but there is clearly institutional memory. There was a brief moment,
with Lloyd Axworthy, when then was a strong push to get NATO moving
on a, dare I say, comprehensive approach to arms control and disarmament—you
have heard that from me before. For it to look favourably at the
arms trade treaty would be useful, but because it deals with trade
and NATO is not a trading organisation, there are limits to what
it can do in that respect, but more broadly, there is huge scope
for NATO to be more active in this area.
It is ironic that, for both institutions, the
internal security arrangements that provide a peace dividend for
European citizens ensure that these arms agreements are about
the only ones that neither the EU or NATO exports as part of either's
programmes. That is a significant irony and a gap that we ought
to look to fill with the opportunity of new Government.
Roy Isbister: On the EU side of
things, the EU is behind the arms trade treaty: it has nailed
its colours to the ATT mast. It is not unique in that there are
other countries and a predominant number of states and other regions
who also support an ATT. As I mentioned, the EU is funding a series
of regional seminars around the world over the next 15 months
to look at this. The problem is that because the EU has a capacity
that a lot of other states struggle to match, it is easy for the
treaty to be seen as an EU baby. They can be more active in promoting
it than can other states without the same capacity, and therein
lies the danger: the ATT can be seen, wrongly, as something that
has been cooked up by the EU, which is now trying to extend the
EU Code of Conduct, now the Common Position. That is unfortunate
because there are plenty of other states around the world that
are showing just as much support for the treaty as the EU is.
On the NATO side of things, with the US being
the leader of NATO and given the US position on the arms trade
treaty until now, it has been quite a difficult area. I mentioned
the political dimension to Wassenaar, but that can be written
even larger when you talk about NATO, which some states consider,
rightly or wrongly, to be actively threatening. There is a dimension
to the NATO component where you have to be careful about having
NATO in the lead.
Q172 Mr. Purchase: Colleagues
referred earlier to visits to Geneva and Vienna. You will both
have a good grasp of what all of these organisations—the
UN, NATO, the EU, the OSCE—do. It has become difficult for
us to avoid the conclusion that there is considerable overlap
and that it is not always clear what the particular duties of
these organisations are. I am especially interested in how the
EU might develop as a more powerful voice in these negotiations,
but I fear at the same that the blurring around the edges and
the other voices may undermine that. Do you have a comment to
make?
Dr. Plesch: I sympathise about
the organisations. Things like the Wassenaar arrangement or the
Zangger committee sound like airport thrillers. Clearly all these
institutions are developed over time. There is some competition
between the EU and NATO: you have generations of officials engaged
in EU-NATO dialogue who are playing out a ritual, much as we used
to with the Warsaw Pact in some ways.
We have to ask: are we better off? Which ones
do we want to get rid of? Top of the list might be the Organisation
for Security and Co-operation in Europe but I think it is one
of the more critical bodies, the Cinderella of the European institutions,
which could do with more enforcement. I do not think that in the
course of this discussion we can get into picking them off.
When we developed the first EU code of conduct
in the early 1990s and we talked to Labour in opposition and to
other parties here it was a pipedream. Then it was, "Oh well,
it does not matter because it will not be binding." Now here
we are and it has got finally to the level of being legally binding.
It is easy to be impatient—I am impatient—but if you
look at the trajectory over the past 20 years or so, you see it
is quite unprecedented.
Mr. Purchase: At any time, we would have
expected to see Harry Lime appear again in Vienna.
Chairman: Okay. We will not go there.
I will just bring Ming in quickly and then we have to move on.
Q173 Sir Menzies Campbell: I think
what you last said owes a great deal to the efforts of Robin Cook.
Dr. Plesch: Yes, indeed.
Q174 Sir Menzies Campbell: Can I
take you back to the NATO question? In the past 10 years, or since
the break up of the Warsaw pact, NATO's emphasis has been on enlargement.
Along with that has gone the question of capability and persuading
new members to maintain capability and to add to it. It may be
that that function of NATO has inevitably stood in the way of
disarmament. On the face of it, it would be inconsistent to say
that we want to increase the capability of NATO, but at the same
time we want a process of disarmament.
Dr. Plesch: As you might expect,
to some degree I entirely agree with that. In some specialist
areas, such as the management of munitions stockpiles and destruction
of munitions, where NATO has played an effective role and the
US has as well—the Bush Administration did a number of useful
things in this area, and we should not forget that. But yes, as
I alluded to earlier, there is a huge problem globally in that
Europe and the Euro-Atlantic community did not export the arms
control and security confidence building measures that brought
peace to the continent and enabled a huge peace dividend. We have
not exported them either through the EU or through NATO. If we
are talking about the sustainable development agenda, one key
way to do that is to export these things.
There was some talk, for example, during Malcolm
Rifkind's time at the Foreign Office and by the first Bush Administration,
of having an OSCE for the middle east and taking these processes
into the middle east. In the present climate we need to see a
renewal of that. We have a programme of annual conferences at
my centre on this with people from the region. We are starting
to see a better climate.
Chairman: We have to move quickly to
two other areas and then conclude this session, because we have
another witness waiting.
Q175 Mr. Hamilton: Can I move
us to the illicit trade in small arms and the UN Programme of
Action, which, as we know, is a non-legally binding informal political
agreement? Do either of you have a view on whether the move towards
an arms trade treaty has in some way put the programme of action
on the back burner? How do you see the relationship between the
two?
Roy Isbister: I do not think that
the ATT has put that on the back burner. I think that the PoA
process itself almost put it on the back burner. Going up to the
Review Conference in 2006, which effectively ended in failure,
I do not think it had anything to do with the arms trade treaty.
It was resurrected in 2008 with the last Biennial Meeting of States,
which produced an outcome document that was more tightly focused
on the implementation of existing ideas. The arms transfer component
was only one part of the programme of action. One of the key issues
for discussion in 2008 was stockpile security. A lot of work was
done to develop the idea of good stockpile security and how states
can assist others to get to grips with their stockpiles.
We are now in a better position with the Programme
of Action than we were a couple of years ago. I think there was
a period when there was confusion among states wondering whether
if they had an ATT, it meant that they did not need a POA, or
asking why they needed an ATT when they were looking at a POA.
Obviously, the POA is about only small arms, whereas the ATT is
about conventional arms—there is quite a difference between
them. I think that we have now separated the two and are comfortable
that both can move forward. There is still a lot of value to be
had from the Programme of Action.
Q176 Mr. Hamilton: You mentioned
the Biennial Meeting of States that took place last year. The
Government said that there was a reasonable outcome to that meeting.
Would you agree?
Roy Isbister: Yes.
Q177 Mr. Hamilton: Do you think,
therefore, that non-legally binding political processes, such
as the programme of action, have had their day, or is the future
purely in a statutory treaty such as the arms trade treaty? Can
we have both? Are they mutually compatible?
Roy Isbister: Yes, I think it
is horses for courses. There is a real need for an Arms Trade
Treaty to be legally binding—to have some teeth—so
that there is the possibility of enforcement. The Programme of
Action is more about getting a large number of states to improve
the small arms environment in their own countries. I would have
to look at this in more detail, but I think that, in many ways,
a political commitment is an appropriate way forward. A broad
and expansive Programme of Action allows states to pick and choose
where they need to prioritise and what they need to focus on.
I think it would be unreasonable to say to a state with little
capacity, "Bang, you are legally obliged to do all of this
stuff, regardless of how relevant it is to your circumstances."
Q178 Mr. Hamilton: Given what you
said about the political nature of the programme of action, what
difference do you think President Obama will make?
Roy Isbister: It is too early
to say. The US has done a lot on the small arms issue, but its
priority has been on bilateral action and it has tended to be
dismissive of the Programme of Action as a big international talking
shop where nothing gets done. I think that there has been some
validity to that criticism, which is why the BMS last year focused
on just a few key issues with the idea that there has to be a
move to implementation, rather than just a rhetorical agreement.
Q179 Chairman: Is there any prospect
of action on the question of brokering at an international level
and action against people who operate internationally outside
of the role of national Governments, or is there no consensus
on that?
Roy Isbister: On the small arms
side of things, the BMS recommended to states that they implemented
the recommendations of the group of governmental experts on brokering,
which include putting national legislation in place to control
the activities of brokers. The vast majority of states still have
no controls, but all states have made a political commitment to
do that. That is one area that would be positive.
In terms of looking at the Arms Trade Treaty
stream, we see an Arms Trade Treaty as covering brokering. Such
an ATT would mean that states would be legally obliged to control
the activities of their brokers for all conventional arms.
3 Note by witness: Speaking only for Saferworld and
not the UK Working Group as a whole. Back
4
Note by witness: In this we are unlike our UK Working Group partners
Amnesty or an Oxfam, nor do we have large public memberships that
campaigns but we do advocate for change. Back
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