Assessing the Risks of the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty

After a second negotiating conference failed to reach consensus, the U.N. General Assembly adopted the U.N. Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) by majority vote in April. The treaty has already been signed by more than eighty nations, and is likely to gain the fifty national ratifications it needs to come into force within a year. The Obama Administration supported the negotiation of the treaty, and has announced it will sign the ATT "as soon as the process of conforming the official translations is completed satisfactorily," which will likely happen in late August. After that, the U.S. could sign at any time, and is likely to do so before or at the opening of the next session of the U.N. General Assembly in mid-September. The ATT has been widely criticized because of the process by which it was adopted, its conceptual and textual flaws, and its status as an emerging "international norm" that treaty supporters wish to further develop in ways that will constrain the U.S. It has also drawn considerable skepticism on the Hill, where a concurrent resolution offered by Senator Jerry Moran (R-KS) and Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) has 35 bipartisan cosponsors in the Senate and 148 in the House. Join us for this panel of experts who will review the process by which the ATT was negotiated, and assess the risks it poses to the U.S.