Arms control activists urged UN treaty writers on Monday to approve a system for tracking small arms sales around the world, saying it was easier to track lost airline luggage than a machine gun. Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Action Network on Small Arms called for a legally binding global marking and tracing treaty covering small arms and ammunition at the start of a two-week UN conference weighing how to deal with the problem.
"A piece of lost luggage can be traced from San Francisco to Sierra Leone within hours, yet deadly weapons disappear without trace on a daily basis," said Jeremy Hobbs, the director of Oxfam International.
A report by the three groups found that while weapons and ammunition often carry serial numbers, there is no world-wide system to record the information and make it available world-wide.
Nor are arms brokers - middlemen who arrange arms sales across borders, putting them beyond the reach of most national governments - required to register and report on their dealings in most countries.
That renders serial numbers "useless as a tool to identify, locate and trace illegal arms shipments," the groups said.
A world-wide marking and tracing mechanism would help enforce arms embargoes and identify international brokers who violated national or international laws, ultimately saving lives, they said.
The 191-nation UN General Assembly adopted a global action plan in 2001 to try to reduce the carnage from the $1 billion-a-year illegal trade in small arms.
But arms activists say the UN crackdown, because it was not binding on governments, has yet to make a real difference in stemming the bloodshed, particularly in Africa where small arms are sold and resold and are the weapon of choice in numerous low-level conflicts and civil wars.
The small-arms category includes powerful weapons like grenades, mortars, assault rifles and shoulder-fired antitank and antiaircraft missiles as well as handguns.
More than half of the global small-arms trade is believed to be legal. But weapons that start out legal often find their way into the black market, with arms stolen from state security forces a major source of the supply, studies have found.