PRESS BRIEFING BY PRESIDENT OF SMALL ARMS CONFERENCE

PRESS BRIEFING BY PRESIDENT OF SMALL ARMS CONFERENCE

Briefing correspondents at Headquarters this afternoon on the status of the United Nations Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects, Ambassador Camilo Reyes (Colombia), President of the Conference, said "there are good reasons to be optimistic -- we have a very good chance of arriving at a final document for the programme of action".

Ambassador Reyes said that he had introduced a new proposal for the programme of action, which he had presented to the Conference this morning.  That proposal would be examined this afternoon with the intention of finding the political will to enable the Conference to determine which paragraphs did not elicit objections.  Hopefully, that would slowly and gradually build a consensus leading to adoption of the programme of action by the end of this week.

Ambassador Reyes said the Conference was now half way through the two-week period allotted to it.  The process so far had produced very clear-cut parameters and there were obviously still differences among delegations.

Last week, a very interesting objective debate had taken place, continued Mr. Reyes.  "We went over the main document, the programme of action, looked at all four sections and heard a number of responses that were extremely useful both to the presidency and the entire gathering.  The responses were useful because the method of work enabled delegations to focus on their own priorities."

A correspondent observed that a quick read of the new document suggested that many of the provisions that the United States and other countries wanted omitted were still in the programme of action and, in some cases, had been strengthened.  He wanted to know how the politics behind that should be read.

Responding, Ambassador Reyes said that there was a need to reflect possible solutions to problems or approximations to possible solutions in the document.  Similarly, there was a need to flag areas where the Conference was still in state of division.  That was a way of making it clear that agreement was lacking in such and such an area and that obviously, on those particular topics, there would be a need for sharper focus and more effort.

Responding to question on arms transactions, he said some delegations felt that the Conference should urge all countries to engage only in government-to-government transactions.  In the eyes of some other delegations, however, such a restriction was not justified.  For those delegations, there had to be some other way of controlling the trade or more clearly identifying and monitoring its trends.  If there was standard setting and the development of permits, one should not have to forbid a government from selling arms to non-government entities.   There was, however, no agreement on the issue and, therefore, more intense work was needed to see if a formula could be found.

A correspondent wanted to know if it was a matter of consensus that there should be no definition of small arms in the draft programme of action. 

Ambassador Reyes said he could not say at this stage if there was a consensus on anything because the Conference had not yet taken a stand.  That was something that would be done this week, and he did not feel he was entitled to act as spokesman since there were still many delegations with different ideas.

Ambassador Reyes said that there seemed to be a tendency to avoid a tremendous debate on exactly what small arms or light weapons were, and instead to develop a programme that would make a dent in the tremendous problem created by all types of weapons.

Another correspondent said it was quite clear that that there were significant differences among Member States on critical aspects of the programme of action.  The usual United Nations procedure was to try and paper over such developments with language that was acceptable and ambiguous.  He asked whether it would not be best at this time to make the differences very clear so that people knew where everything stood.

Ambassador Reyes told the correspondent that if he had attended the preparatory processes and been in the room over the last few days, he would be in a position to very clearly identify the various delegations.  It would be easy to find out exactly what the topics or critical points were, or where there were differences.  It had been very clear, but perhaps because of the nature of the negotiations and process it was not obvious to every single person.  But certainly any delegation that had been working on the issue for years or had attended the last few days be able to identify the sticking points most accurately.

Another correspondent wanted to know whether the United States had accepted the idea of a new document.  Ambassador Reyes said he would have to wait to hear the official response of that country's delegation this afternoon.  He believed, however, that the document reflected the reality on the ground for the entire group of countries attending the Conference.  To a considerable degree, it also translated the political will into something that could achieve a result at the end of the week.

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