Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-05-10-Speech-2-200"
| Predicate | Value (sorted: default) |
|---|---|
| rdf:type | |
| dcterms:Date | |
| dcterms:Is Part Of | |
| dcterms:Language | |
| lpv:document identification number |
"en.20050510.23.2-200"2
|
| lpv:hasSubsequent | |
| lpv:speaker | |
| lpv:spokenAs | |
| lpv:translated text |
".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, in the world in which we live nearly 700 million weapons are in circulation and a further eight million are produced each year.
Businesses are manufacturing them, brokers are putting them on sale, governments and individuals are buying and selling them and people are dying: at the rate of one a minute. With those words Amnesty International has recently launched the Marking and Tracing project, a treaty under which States undertake to adopt measures for identifying all weapons and ammunition with a serial number that cannot be falsified nor destroyed. This represents a necessary step in preventing the illegal trade in arms. For as long as arms remain unidentifiable, States and businesses will always deny responsibility for them.
The European Union should actively support this campaign. From 1999 to 2003, Italy, for instance, as the second most important small arms manufacturer in the world and the first at European level, sold, in defiance of legislative decrees, EUR 36 million of arms to countries involved in armed conflicts, EUR 3.6 million to nations under embargo and EUR 128 million to countries condemned for human rights violations. On the other hand, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council control 88% of the global market in arms.
For all of these reasons, it is essential that the European Union adopts the treaty on arms brokering drafted by a group of NGOs and Nobel prize winners, and launches a convention on arms brokers that
makes any activity with the aim of transferring arms between third parties subject to state authorisation.
The European Union must improve its code of conduct on the transfer of arms, clarifying the circumstances in which it is possible to refuse an authorisation to export arms, extending checks to all military equipment, forcing individual States to bring in legislation in compliance with the code of conduct and to publish an annual report on their respective arms exports.
We cannot forget that it is precisely small arms that are responsible for nearly the entire sum of deaths in conflicts taking place across our world."@en1
|
| lpv:unclassifiedMetadata |
Named graphs describing this resource:
The resource appears as object in 2 triples