The National Rifle Association (NRA) is concerned with protecting the US Constitutional Right to keep and bear arms. Why would this organization care about the international arms trade and global efforts to prevent weapons from being transferred to places where that will be used for war crimes and human rights violations? There are rules that bind countries to agreed-upon conduct for many areas of international trade. But while the US and other countries chose to control arms flows in its national law, there are still no global rules for the cross-border trade in weapons. The resulting unrestrained arms trade has fueled war crimes, human rights abuse, organized crime, terrorism, and undermined development endeavors.

I have been working on this issue since 2004, and I still don’t really understand their objections. Excerpts from Mr. LaPierre’s speech are below, accompanied by the facts.

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On Wednesday June 29, France confirmed that it parachuted arms, including guns and rocket-propelled grenades, to the Libyan rebels in the Nafusa Mountains. This arms transfer is a blatant violation of the arms embargo which was agreed to by the UN Security Council Resolution 1970 on February 26, 2011. The embargo placed on Libya is comprehensive and applies both to rebels and forces loyal to Muammar Gaddafi. The subsequent authorization of the use of force in UNSC resolution 1973 amends the February 26 resolution by calling on Members States to ensure strict implementation of the arms embargo through inspection of all sea vessels and planes bound for Libya believed to be carrying arms.

France’s action is spurring a legal debate. While the UNSC resolution 1973 appears to strengthen the embargo by calling for strict implementation, France is arguing that the authorization of the use of force to protect civilians overrides the embargo since the weapons were used to protect civilians. Russia has formally disagreed and officially complained about the arms transfer, saying that “if it is confirmed, it’s a flagrant violation” of the arms embargo.

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Businesses that adapt to climate change with community needs in mind can gain a competitive edge.

This is one of the key findings of a report that Oxfam released today in partnership with the UN Global Compact, UN Environment Programme (UNEP), and the World Resources Institute. The report makes a strong business case for investments in climate change adaptation while finding that most companies have yet to develop strategies to deal with the long-term impacts of climate change.

Drawing on the results of a survey among companies engaged in Caring for Climate, the joint climate action platform of the UN Global Compact and UNEP, the report calls on the private sector to invest in climate change adaptation in ways that build the resilience of vulnerable communities in developing countries – many of which are already affected by more frequent and intense storms, water scarcity, declining agricultural productivity, and poor health.

The bottom line is that community risks are business risks. In fact, 83 percent of companies surveyed responded that climate change impacts pose a risk to their products and services. Local and global companies rely on community members as employees, suppliers, and customers, and they depend on services and infrastructure to be able to operate. If farmers are unable to meet production targets, a local port is destroyed by a storm, or a community is ravaged by malaria, then businesses suffer as well.

The good news is that there is growing recognition among companies that while climate change poses significant risks to operations and value chains, it also brings new opportunities to improve business practices, and to create business value while helping people adapt. Among the companies surveyed, 86 percent of them saw responding to climate risks or investing in adaptation as a business opportunity, and 56 percent of them recognized the important opportunity of accessing new markets for climate adaptation-related products and services. Swiss Re, for example, is highlighted in the report because of an innovative weather-index insurance product offered to poor farmers in Ethiopia has helped to protect their staple crop, teff, in the event of drought. Because of its success, Swiss Re is working with Oxfam and the World Food Programme to scale up this new product to achieve critical mass necessary for commercial viability.

But beyond planning for the most obvious or immediate threats, such as increasingly unreliable access to key inputs like water, for example, or damage to assets from flooding, most companies are not yet taking concrete steps to address climate change risks and to respond to new opportunities in a comprehensive, integrated way. This is at least in part due to a lack of widespread understanding of climate-related risks, what climate adaptation is, and what it means for companies or for the markets they serve.

Strategic private sector adaptation to climate change must be a purposeful process: it will not happen by chance. Companies must prioritize adaptation and take action to address risks and pursue opportunities in partnership with communities. Governments can assist companies to overcome barriers to investment and harness the resources and innovation of the private sector to contribute to the public good.

Addressing the adaptation needs of vulnerable communities at the scale that is necessary will require unprecedented levels of cooperation, collaboration and resource mobilization among governments, businesses, civil society groups, and communities themselves. The private sector has much to contribute to and benefit from the development and implementation of climate change adaptation solutions, including sector-specific expertise, technology, significant levels of financing, efficiency and an entrepreneurial spirit. The key is to find the nexus of shared interest where business incentives align with communities’ adaptation needs.

This blog was written by Noah Gottschalk, Senior policy advisor for humanitarian response.

The Republic of South Sudan will become the world’s newest country on July 9, just over three weeks from today. Casting a shadow over the celebrations that should mark South Sudan’s first independence day will be the situation along the new country’s border with the north.

Since I last wrote about the contested area of Abyei, from which the United Nations now estimates over 100,000 people have been displaced, the situation has deteriorated, with fighting spreading to neighboring South Kordofan. Latest reports indicate 6,000 people are seeking safe haven around the UN compound in the state capital Kadugli, with estimates of nearly 60,000 more displaced and unknown numbers seeking refuge in the Nuba Mountains, their exact whereabouts and condition unknown. To further complicate matters, ongoing violence and serious fuel shortages are making it harder for people to flee fighting and for aid groups to reach people in need. Higher fuel costs also mean higher commodity prices, a serious problem in a place where 90% of people live on less than one dollar a day.

While aid efforts are underway to assist people who have fled Abyei, the UN has been investigating why its peacekeepers were unable to prevent the crisis from escalating in the first place. Last week, General Babacar Gaye, the former commander of UN troops in neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo and currently the top adviser to the UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) visited Sudan to find out for himself. His conclusions were damning. A spokesman said the peacekeepers “could have and should have had more visibility to deter any violence against civilians” and insisted that they would learn from these mistakes.

Discussions in New York over the coming weeks will have a big role in determining if this will actually happen. South Sudan will get a new UN Peacekeeping mission when it becomes a new country. At issue is whether the new mission prioritizes the protection of civilians from violence with a mandate under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to physically intervene – with force if necessary – when civilians’ lives – including aid workers – are under threat. Some within the US government are reluctant to give the new mission the mandate to do so, worrying that it might be seen as undermining the new government of South Sudan. The reality, however, is that the new government, despite its laudable public commitments to protecting its people from violence, still needs support from the international community. The new government continues to work to transform its fighting forces into a professional army and to develop a civilian police service, and faces significant challenges in protecting southern Sudanese against the wide array of threats they face. North-South tensions are not the only such threats: civilians are also increasingly put at risk by violence between the SPLA and other armed groups, large scale clashes between communities, and the ongoing threat of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

As one of my colleagues working in Juba recently said, “Protection of civilians is an extremely complex, resource-intensive and politically sensitive task, one which arguably UNMIS was not set up to effectively do.” We can change that if the new mission gets it right from the start. It should have a mandate both to protect civilians from violence and to work with the new government to make it better able to protect its own people in the longer term, so in the future it can do so without a peacekeeping force.

In January, President Obama described the relatively peaceful referendum in which southern Sudanese overwhelmingly voted for secession as giving “the world renewed faith in the prospect of a peaceful, prosperous future for all of the Sudanese people — a future that the American people long to see in Sudan.” That future is at risk right now. But our government can and must make the right decisions to support the world’s newest country and its people, and to restore the hope we all felt just five months ago. Supporting a Chapter VII mandate is the best way to start.

This blog was written by Noah Gottschalk, Senior policy advisor for humanitarian response

Tensions are running high in Sudan, where an upsurge in violence in the border region of Abyei has displaced tens of thousands of people and raised fears of a return to all-out war.

With just over six weeks to go before South Sudan becomes the world’s newest country, the world’s focus has largely been on the incredible accomplishments of the largely peaceful referendum held last January to determine the future of Sudan. The results of that vote, which was a key provision of the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that ended more than two decades of conflict, were overwhelmingly for secession, and southerners have been readying themselves for what they had hoped would be a peaceful independence day.

Yet with the violence in Abyei – an area roughly the size of Connecticut that was one of the worst-affected areas during the war and has long been seen as a key flashpoint of conflict –the security situation is on a knife-edge. The conflict in Abyei comes at a time when southern Sudan is facing its most violent year since the end of the civil war in 2005. Not including these recent events, over 1,400 people have been killed in southern Sudan so far this year – already more than in the whole of 2010 – and at least 117,000 have fled their homes, as violence has dramatically increased in recent months.

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Senate Democrats are seeking to protect energy and climate programs targeted by the House’s aggressive budget cuts, a move that accelerates the chambers toward a clash over President Obama’s key priorities and a possible government shutdown. The world is consuming grains faster than farmers are growing them, draining reserves and pushing prices to the levels that fueled food riots in poor countries three years ago. Ongoing shortages could leave the rebels too weak to topple Qaddafi, but the U.S. may be in a position to help. The world has become increasingly vulnerable to food crises in the wake of the global financial crisis and the commodity boom of 2007-08, the United Nations’ food body said Monday.

Democrats Provide a Counteroffer to GOP Cuts on Energy and Climate
ClimateWire
March 7, 2011

U.S. Farmers Head into Key Stretch for Harvests
WSJ
Scott Kilman
March 7, 2011

How Food Could Determine Libya’s Future
The Atlantic
Christopher R. Albon
March 7, 2011

U.N. Says World Vulnerable to Food Crises
WSJ
March 7, 2011
*Oxfam Quoted

Section 2773 of the US Arms Export Controls Act states that since “the problems of Sub-Saharan Africa are primarily those of economic development…the President shall exercise restraint in selling defense articles and defense services, and in providing financing for sales of defense articles and defense services, to countries in Sub-Saharan Africa. “

I see this section of US law as an affirmation by Congress that guns and tanks alone do not make countries safe and that arms trade decisions must be linked to and strengthen poverty reduction efforts.
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Throughout the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union distributed billions worth of weapons to their ideological allies in the developing world. While the Cold War and the revolutions it spawned receded into history, many of these weapons remain.

The AK-47, probably the most ubiquitous weapon used today in conflict zones, was designed to have a life-span of 40 years. These and other weapons, distributed decades ago to fight the Cold War, are now being used to terrorize women, men, and children in conflict zones and areas of instability. Old weapons remain deadly because there are always a steady flow of bullets to load into them. A weapon only becomes lethal when it is supplied with ammunition. Controlling the flow of ammunition into zones of instability and conflict is just as important as controlling the actual weapons. An example from the Kenyan-Sudan border provides a window into why it’s so critical to control ammunition supplies. According to a Small Arms Survey investigation, “a dispute between Toposa and Turkana pastoralist warriors degenerated into a firefight that consumed all of their ammunition.” As a result of their rifles becoming useless, the rivals decided to resolve their differences peacefully.

So if controlling ammunition flows can help save lives and shorten the length of conflicts, why is it that I heard the Obama administration representative make an intervention at the United Nations yesterday saying that it opposes adding controls on international transfers of small arms ammunition into the proposed Arms Trade Treaty?

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Next week at the United Nations, governments and civil society representatives will gather for the latest round of discussion toward a global arms trade treaty (ATT), aiming to close a gaping hole in international law. One of the signature characteristics of the numerous fragile countries where Oxfam provides humanitarian relief is the failure of governments to control their own territory. In such environments, armed groups at times provide security for populations and at other times prey on populations for financial and political gain.

In places like Somalia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the lack of accountability and effective security institutions has enabled all parties to the conflict to perpetrate gross human rights abuse with impunity. Regaining civility in these contexts is one of the most vexing problems governments and the international community faces and requires a variety of approaches.

It is clear that no effort to regain civility in fragile and conflict affected countries will succeed unless arms flows are addressed. At a 2007 Oxfam event, the former UN Commander in the DRC described his efforts to address the armed groups destabilizing the country as “mopping the floor when the tap was open. One moment you disarm a group, and then a week later the same group has fresh arms and ammunition.”
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Oxfam International submitted its formal comments on a draft set of UN “Guiding Principles” for business and human rights last week. These Principles, if approved, will constitute a major milestone in a long-standing effort to apply human rights standards directly to corporations. More about where to from here on business and human rights in future posts. This post will try to put the Principles into some perspective.

The Principles cap six years of work by Harvard Professor John Ruggie – the UN Special Representative on business and human rights. Ruggie was thrown into this process by Secretary General Kofi Annan in the wake of a bitter fight over a set of draft “UN Norms” – vigorously promoted by human rights advocates (including Oxfam), but roundly rejected by governments and businesses.

Ruggie’s first full report to the UN Human Rights alienated much of the NGO community by rejecting and thereby essentially killing the Norms. But at the same time, that report provided a very effective argument for the urgent need to address corporate human rights impunity. The core human rights treaties, designed in a post-World War II era of powerful states, don’t contemplate corporations explicitly and are ill-suited to current realities. Jurisdictionally-limited and often weak, under-funded, or corrupt public authorities are little match for today’s 80,000 plus multi-national corporations with their vast and amorphous global networks, buttressed by thousands of trade and investment agreements.
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