Constitutional Law

U.N. efforts

At Opinio Juris, Kenneth Anderson has a response to a NY Times hit piece on NRA and the UN.

"The movement toward a small arms and light weapons treaty got going in the wake of the landmines ban treaty; it was a natural follow-on for the then-ascendent global civil society movement. But I recall sitting in meetings of landmines advocates talking about where things should go next; I was director of the Human Rights Watch Arms Division, with a mandate to address the transfer of weapons into conflicts where they would be used in the violation of the laws of war, and small arms were the main concern. I was astonished at how quickly the entire question morphed from concern about the flood of weapons into African civil wars how to use international law to do an end run around supposedly permissive gun ownership regimes in the US. ....

I dropped any personal support for the movement when it became clear, a long time ago, that it is about controlling domestic weapons equally in the US (or, today, even more so) as in Somalia or Congo. Yes, there is a logic, a coherency, to the idea that one needs a set of universal rules that are more or less the same for every place. One can choose between that idea and the one that I urged, that it was both substantively wrong and disastrous strategy to think that the rules for a profoundly broken place, lands of civil wars and failed states, should or could be the same as for a functioning democratic society. The small arms and light weapons movement long ago made its choice about that, and I dropped it at that time."

Hat tip to Joe Olson....

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on July 20, 2008 (boomark / email).