By Lucas Musetti
On Tuesday, October 17, the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA) held a side event panel during the annual meeting of the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly on disarmament and international security. The panel, called Scrapping the Surplus: Failures and Successes in Destroying Excess SALW and Ammunition, focused on the destruction of surplus stockpiles of small arms and light weapons (SALW). IANSA’s YouTube video, “Silencing the Guns,” played as an introduction to the panel. The video offers the views of IANSA and UN personnel on the proliferation of SALW and the upcoming Review Conference on the UN Programme of Action on Small Arms and Light Weapons.
The meeting was chaired by Ivor Fung, Deputy Director, Secretary of the Conference on Disarmament at the UN Office at Geneva, and Baffour Amoa, Chair of the International Advisory Council for IANSA. The panel was accompanied by a publication from IANSA entitled, “Surplus and Illegal Small Arms, Light Weapons and their Ammunition: the consequences of failing to dispose and safely destroy them,” written by Peter Danssaert and Brian Wood. Mr. Wood was also joined by Melanie Regimbal, Director of UNRILEC; Juan Camilo Diaz Reina, Election Officer of the Colombian Permanent Mission to the United Nations; Christof Baldus from Technische Hilfswerk; Jones Borthley Applerh, Executive Director of the Small Arms Commission; Arben Idrizi of the OSCE and Albanian government; and Maya de Leon of IANSA. Read below for a breakdown of their remarks at the panel.
To read more articles on this topic go to http://nonviolenceny.org/nonviolent-journal.