UN arms embargoes: an overview of the last ten years

This briefing provides a summary and overview of current concerns over the enforcement and monitoring of UN arms embargoes. For further detail, please refer to the attached report, ’Strengthening compliance with UN arms embargoes – key challenges for monitoring and verification’.

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Introduction

Despite the fact that every one of the 13 United Nations arms embargoes imposed in the last decade has been systematically violated, only a handful of the many arms embargo breakers named in UN sanctions reports has been successfully prosecuted. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, between 1990 and 2001 there were 57 separate major armed conflicts raging around the globe, yet only eight of them were subject to UN arms embargoes.

Such embargoes are usually late and blunt instruments, and the UN Sanctions Committees, which oversee the embargoes, have to rely largely on Member States to monitor and implement them. Therefore, arms embargoes cannot be deployed effectively as an instrument by the UN to prevent illicit arms trafficking, without better national controls on international arms transfers. These controls are woefully inadequate.

In addition, the Sanctions Committees of the Security Council have to rely on UN investigative teams and UN peacekeeping missions to investigate violations of embargoes and report compliance. However, these bodies usually have inadequate resources and time to do that work thoroughly.

There are currently UN mandatory territorial arms embargoes in force against the Ivory Coast, Liberia and Somalia. Non-state actors (rebel groups and their leaders) are also subject to arms embargoes. Currently, every state in the international community is prohibited from transferring arms to such non-state actor groups in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and in Sudan, as well as to Al-Qaida and associated persons.

In the last decade, there have also been embargoes imposed on Angolan armed rebels (1992 to 2002), Ethiopia and Eritrea (2000 to 2001), Iraq (1990 to 2003), Libya (1992 to 2003), and the former Yugoslavia (1991 to 1996 and again from 1998 to 2001). None of these mandatory UN arms embargoes has stopped the supply of arms; sometimes the embargoes have made it logistically more difficult and expensive to acquire the desired arms, but available evidence suggests that on the whole violations of UN arms embargoes appear persistent, widespread and systematic.

Date of original publication: March 2006