Control Arms Media Briefing: key facts and figures

The arms
trade is out of control
Every day, millions of men, women, and children live in fear of
armed violence. Every minute, one of them is killed. From the
gangs of Rio de Janeiro and Los Angeles, to the civil wars and
armed rebellions in Uganda and Nepal, conventional weapons are
used to do the killing. The global trade in arms that brings these
weapons into the hands of killers is a multi-billion dollar business.

  • There are
    over 600 million small arms in the world, or one for every ten
    people, produced by over 1,000 companies in at least 98 countries.
  • 8 million
    more small arms are produced every year.
  • 16 billion
    units of ammunition are produced each year - more than two new
    bullets for every man, woman and child on the planet.
  • Nearly
    60 per cent of small arms are in civilian hands.
  • The majority
    of illegal small arms start out as legally traded weapons.

The human
cost
The uncontrolled proliferation and misuse of arms by government
forces and armed groups takes a massive human toll in lost lives.

  • More than
    500,000 people on average are killed with small arms every year:
    one person every minute.
  • Small arms
    are the cause of 60-90% of direct conflict deaths.
  • There are
    300,000 child soldiers involved in conflicts.
  • Torture
    and ill treatment by state officials - mostly armed police -
    was persistent in over 70 countries between 1997 and 2000.
  • Women and
    girls are raped at gunpoint during armed conflict - for example,
    15,700 in Rwanda and 25,000 in Croatia and Bosnia.

Conventional
arms proliferation and misuse destroy individuals' livelihoods
and prevent countries from escaping from poverty.

  • One third
    of countries spend more on the military than they do on health-care
    services.
  • An average
    of US$22 billion a year is spent on arms by countries in Africa,
    Asia, Middle East and Latin America. Half of this amount would
    enable every girl and boy in those regions to go to primary
    school.
  • El Salvador's
    expenditure on its health services to deal with the effects
    of violence amounts to more than 4 per cent of its GDP.
  • Nearly
    half (42 per cent) of countries with the highest defence spending
    rank among the lowest in human development.
  • In Africa,
    economic losses due to war are about US$15 billion per year.
  • Pakistan's
    total defence spending is one-third of its annual GDP, or half
    if arms-related debt repayments are included.

The Control
Arms Campaign
For these reasons Amnesty International, Oxfam and the International
Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA, represented in Canada by
Project Ploughshares) have come together for Control Arms, a major
global campaign launched in 2003 in over 50 countries around the
world.

The Control
Arms campaign is calling for urgent and coordinated action, from
the local to the international level, to prevent the proliferation
and misuse of arms. The campaign is calling for:

  • International
    level: Governments to agree on rules to stop arms from being
    exported to destinations where they are likely to be used to
    commit grave violations of human rights and international humanitarian
    law.
  • Regional
    level: Governments to develop and strengthen regional arms control
    agreements, to uphold human rights and international humanitarian
    law.
  • National
    level: Governments to improve state capacity and their own accountability
    to control arms transfers and protect citizens from armed violence,
    in accordance with international laws and standards.
  • Community
    level: Civil society and local government agencies to take effective
    action to improve safety at community level, by reducing the
    local availability and demand for arms.

Since the
campaign was launched, 45 countries have expressed explicit support
for an Arms Trade Treaty. Canada is not one of them. Over 100
countries have come out for controls on weapons transfers, Canada
among them.

What can
be done
The UN World Summit on Small Arms and Light Weapons, to be held
100 days from today in June, will seek to reduce the proliferation
and misuse of these weapons around the world. Unless real progress
is made at the June summit, hundreds of thousands of people stand
to lose their lives.

Canada must
take leadership of the UN process, and ensure the June summit
gets results in strengthened government commitments to deal with
small arms proliferation and misuse, and sets an agenda for concrete
follow-up actions.

What you
can do
Oxfam, Ploughshares and Amnesty International Canada are seeking
to collect the images of thousands of Canadians in support of
the global "Million-Faces Petition" which will be presented
at the UN summit. The
petition is online at www.controlarms.org.

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