One of the most important initiatives governments concerned about the humanitarian and criminal impact of small arms proliferation could undertake is to provide greater transparency around the small arms exports that they are authorizing. Such information is important to aid and relief workers, who might be working in a region where a sudden influx of guns has occurred or is anticipated. Fuller information about the magnitude and destination of current and future small arms shipments is also a necessary prerequisite for development of sound policy recommendations. Transparency would also facilitate and improve the ability of governments to ensure end-use verification of weapons exports they are authorizing. If such information were made public, increased transparency would allow the non-governmental community, as well as national legislatures, to play an important role in aiding governments efforts to curb diversion of these arms by providing oversight through research, questioning and reporting.
Increased transparency is possible at the global, regional and national levels.
The United Nations and regional security organizations can help facilitate the former two, but such initiatives are, of course, predicated on willingness by governments to engage in greater openness. Concerned states need not wait for some complicated global agreement. They can and should become transparent unilaterally, by providing publicly available reports on the weapons shipments they are authorizing, as a handful of states currently do. A second area of advocacy concerns the vital need for all states to incorporate UN Security Council-mandated arms embargoes fully and clearly into their national laws and regulations. All members of the United Nations are bound by Security Council embargoes, and yet enforcement in recent cases has been extremely weak.