Amnesty International has called for an end to arms transfers to countries including Israel, Sudan, and Myanmar, saying they cause “devastating loss of life” and contravene the Arms Trade Treaty, the parties to which were meeting in Geneva, Switzerland.
The United Nations treaty was signed by well over 100 countries in 2013 and went into effect in 2014, though 27 signatories, including the United States, the world’s largest arms exporter, still haven’t ratified the deal, which regulates the trade of conventional weapons including non-nuclear bombs, shells, and missiles.
“Numerous governments continue to brazenly flout the rules, leading to a huge loss of life in conflict zones,” Patrick Wilcken, an Amnesty researcher, said in an Aug. 19 statement.
“It is time for state parties to live up to their legal obligations and fully implement the Arms Trade Treaty, to prohibit the flow of arms to countries when it is known they would be used for genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes or if it could be used to commit or facilitate serious violations of international human rights or humanitarian law.”
Amnesty called the transfer of arms to Israel a “stark example” of governments’ failure to comply with the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). Though the U.S. is not a state party, as a signatory, it has a duty not to undermine the treaty’s object and purpose, Amnesty’s statement indicated.
“States parties and signatories, including the USA—the largest provider of arms to Israel—continue to license arms transfers to Israel in spite of overwhelming evidence of war crimes committed by Israeli forces,” Wilcken said.
Experts have criticized the Biden administration for not pushing for ratification of the ATT, which the Obama administration helped devise but couldn’t get through Congress. In 2019, then-President Donald Trump announced that he was “unsigning” the treaty, a symbolic act.
U.S.-manufactured weapons have been used in several unlawful Israeli airstrikes documented by Amnesty. Two such strikes on Gazan homes in October together killed 43 civilians, including 19 children and 14 women, and the bombing of another family home in Rafah in January killed 18 civilians, including 10 children and four women. The latter attack used a GBU-39 small diameter bomb manufactured by Boeing.
Amnesty released a report in April detailing the use of U.S.-made weapons in Israeli attacks that the rights group argued could constitute war crimes. American weapons have since been linked to several more devastating strikes, including the “tent massacre” in Rafah in late May, which killed at least 45, mostly women and children.
Amnesty has long called for a full arms embargo on Israel and armed Palestinian groups “because of longstanding patterns of serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law, including war crimes.” Hamas and allied groups killed more than 1,100 Israelis in a brutal massacre on October 7.
The U.S. has delivered major arms to at least 107 countries since 2019 and accounts for 42 percent of global arms transfers, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
In addition to highlighting U.S. arms dealing, Amnesty drew attention to China’s role in two conflict zones, Sudan and Myanmar.
China, a state party to the ATT since 2020, is among the countries that have imported weapons and military equipment into Sudan, which has been locked in a horrifying civil war since April 2023 and, as a result, faces the world’s worst displacement crisis and the prospect of a wide-scale famine that experts have warned could be the worst the world has seen in decades.
China has also supplied Myanmar’s military junta, which retook power in a 2021 coup, Amnesty said.
“The Myanmar military has used these weapons to repeatedly attack civilians and civilian objects—often destroying or damaging schools, religious buildings and other key infrastructure—in the three years since carrying out a coup,” Wilcken said.
The advocacy group Control Arms has issued updates of the Geneva conference on social media.
Amnesty is one of many nonprofit groups, including the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, that have called for ATT state parties to stop transferring weapons to Israel.
—Edward Carver, CommonDreams.org
