After nearly three week negotiating an Arms Trade Treaty, governments on Tuesday completed a draft treaty that campaigners immediately denounced as failing to halt the current, poorly regulated international arms trade, dpa reported.
The talks at UN headquarters in New York were to end Friday. The draft would call for states that ratify the treaty to establish the "highest possible common standards for regulating or improving regulation of the international trade for conventional arms."
It would call for states to "prevent, combat and eradicate the illicit trade in conventional arms and their diversion to illegal and unauthorized end use."
British Foreign Minister William Hague called Tuesday for "the strongest possible treaty."
"We will not sign up to a weak text. We want an agreement which is robust and legally binding and achieves significant gains for the international community, particularly greater security and the preservation of human rights," Hague said from London.
Britain and France, which support a provision that arms transfers cannot be made if they would contribute to human rights violations, have resisted pressure from the United States, China and Russia to drop the demand for an effective human rights protection in the treaty.
Campaigners for a strong treaty that would respect human rights - groups including like Arms Control, Amnesty International and Oxfam International - said the draft treaty may already allow arms exporters, based on national assessment and not an international treaty, to authorize an arms export.
Some major arms exporters like the US, China and Russia want national control of munitions exports, while small countries suffering from conflicts fueled by the illicit arms trade wanted all such exports under an international treaty.
The US, Russia, China, France and Britain - the five UN Security Council permanent members - and Germany are the world's largest arms exporters, accounting for 80 per cent of all arms exports in the world.
The campaigners said a small group of countries, including North Korea, Cuba, Iran and Venezuela, are opposed to a strong treaty and would prefer no treaty at all.