The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is a legally-binding instrument that regulates the international trade in conventional weapons. Among its aims, the treaty promotes cooperation, transparency, and responsibility in the global arms trade by establishing common standards for regulating arms transfers. One of the fundamental obligations of the ATT is reporting, which serves to monitor treaty implementation and discern patterns and dynamics of global arms flows.
ATT Article 13 requires States Parties to complete and submit two reports to the ATT Secretariat. First, the treaty requires States Parties to complete an initial report on treaty implementation – to be submitted within one year of the treaty’s entry into force for a given State Party – and update that report as implementation measures change. The treaty also requires States Parties to complete by 31 May each year an annual report on arms exports and imports that were undertaken in the previous calendar year.
Although ATT reporting is mandatory, many States Parties continue to experience difficulties meeting their ATT reporting requirements. Indeed, the ATT Working Group on Transparency and Reporting, which was established to support reporting efforts among States Parties, has repeatedly identified the need to improve reporting compliance as a priority issue. In 2015, the working group developed provisional templates for both the initial report on treaty implementation and the annual report on arms exports and imports in an effort to facilitate ATT reporting and help standardize information collected from States Parties. These recommended templates were endorsed at the second Conference of States Parties to the ATT.
The proposed mandate for the Working Group on Transparency and Reporting for the period of September 2018 – August 2019 as described in the report to the fourth Conference of States Parties was to “review the effectiveness and clarity of the templates to submit initial and annual reports.”3 The working group considered the reporting templates at the two working group meetings leading up to the fifth Conference of States Parties (CSP5). At the 31 January 2019 working group meeting, as part of the review of the effectiveness and clarity of the templates to submit initial and annual reports, the working group co-chairs asked meeting participants to share comments and suggestions for possible amendments to the templates. At the 4 April 2019 working group meeting, the co-chairs requested again that participants provide suggestions and noted that those suggestions would be shared in the CSP5 working group report. In addition, the co-chairs offered a discussion forum on the restricted area of the ATT website for States Parties to share their views, comments, and suggestions (States may also share such insights by email to the ATT Secretariat). The results of those requests can be found in Annex C of the working group report to CSP5.
This report seeks to identify challenges to the effectiveness and clarity of the reporting templates, to identify solutions to ensure that ATT reporting supports the objectives of transparency and confidence-building as described in the treaty’s object and purpose, and to support the efforts of the Working Group on Transparency and Reporting.
This report examines the ATT reporting templates and identifies both opportunities and challenges for comprehensive reporting. It is intended to serve as a starting point for greater examination of potential changes to the reporting templates. The report is divided into five sections. Section one outlines the practical utility of reporting templates in the context of the ATT. Section two examines challenges presented by the current templates for the initial and annual reports and the ways in which States Parties have provided information for those reports. Section three addresses the voluntary diversion report. Section four offers a series of recommendations to address the challenges in the reporting templates with a view toward strengthening ATT reporting. The fifth and final section concludes with an examination of the ways in which these recommendations can be implemented to support the future work of the Working Group on Transparency and Reporting.
“For a review of the utility of the updated report templates (introduced at CSP7 in 2021), please see Taking Stock of the Use and Impact of the Revised ATT Reporting Templates (2024).”
