Campaign events in 2005

The Control Arms campaign revealed that there is more likelihood of being able to trace a suitcase or a GM tomato than lethal weapons, in a report entitled Tracking Lethal Tools, released in January. The report showed how the lack of a global system to track small arms and ammunition means exporting countries cannot be held accountable for their weapons reaching human rights abusers and war criminals.

On the eve of international Women’s Day, a new report, The Impact of Guns on Women's Lives showed that women are paying an increasingly heavy price for the dangerously unregulated multi-billion-dollar trade in small arms.

In July, key figures in the defence industry, including the British Defence Manufacturers Association and General Kalashnikov, inventor of the AK-47 threw their weight behind an Arms Trade Treaty. They were closely followed by Foreign Ministers from the Great Lakes region of Africa, who openly declared their support for the initiative at a conference on small arms in Nairobi. The same month at the G8 meeting, the world’s most powerful leaders recognised that international standards in arms transfers are necessary in order to tackle uncontrolled arms proliferation.

There was disappointment later in the month when the UN failed to agree a legally binding system to track weapons, leaving the way open for unscrupulous arms dealers to continue to get away with selling weapons to serious human rights abusers and war criminals without being traced.

But just days later, campaigners were celebrating when thirteen more governments - Benin, Colombia, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, the Netherlands, Norway, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Spain, Turkey, Uganda and the Vatican - announced their support for the Arms Trade Treaty. In October, the European Union joined them, announcing its supporting for the ATT for the first time.