Can we control It? Yes we can!

While US election celebrations continue, we've got a victory of our own to announce. After ongoing pressure as part of the Control Arms campaign, an overwhelming majority of UN member states last week reinforced their support for an international treaty.

Oxfam campaigner, Anna Macdonald, explains what happened at the UN in New York.

A team of nervous campaigners from Oxfam, Amnesty International and IANSA gathered in the voting room at the UN on 31 October, to wait for states to vote on whether to move forward on the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) to control the unregulated arms trade.

This was the culmination of years of hard work, and tireless campaigning, since the first victory of this campaign in October 2006. Back then, under pressure from millions of people around the world 139 states voted to start the UN process on this ATT. By now we'd nudged, cajoled, pressurised and done everything we could think of to get states to support this essential and life saving treaty.

Since 2006, we've been busy keeping the pressure on decision makers to act. And this October, we were back in New York, undertaking a gruelling month of lobbying, discussions, events and stunts at the UN.

Using rickshaws, we'd delivered a video message from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, to all UN missions in 192 minutes. We'd handed over our Parliamentarians' Declaration, signed by over 2000 parliamentarians in more than 120 countries to the Chair of the Disarmament and Security Committee. We launched a report that showed how the poorly controlled arms trade was undermining progress towards the Millennium Development Goals.

As Archbishop Tutu warned the UN, "You can and must act to control the deadly trade in weapons that is behind these deaths. There can be no further delay, we can wait no longer."

Most importantly, we passed on the message that millions of people all around the world are watching their governments and waiting for them to deliver an effective ATT.

But that was all done with now, and soon we would know if all of these efforts had paid off. For what felt like an age, we sat apprehensively in the voting room anticipating the now near imminent results.

Moments later, we were celebrating when we saw that 145 states had voted in favour. Two states registered late votes, bringing the final total up to 147. All the hard work had paid off.

Most governments now support an ATT and they must move this process on with urgency. Today's vote is one step closer to turning off the running tap of irresponsible arms transfers which have flooded the world's conflict zones for decades, fueling death, injury and poverty, such as is happening now in DRC.

However we need leaps forward not steps, as every day means hundreds more lives lost. Thanks to all of your efforts, the world has moved closer to controlling this deadly trade.