Reporting is a core element of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT). In Article 1, the treaty’s object and purpose highlights the common international standards for regulating arms transfers to promote cooperation, transparency, and responsibility in the global arms trade. Article 13 explains the treaty’s obligations regarding reporting and 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. Second, 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 the treaty stresses the importance and purpose of reporting, it does not provide any clear guidance on the ways States should report nor does it require States Parties to develop or adopt standardized templates for initial or annual reporting. However, looking closely at the text of Article 13, we can identify some guidance for the contents of the two mandatory reports. Article 13(1) states that the initial report should include information on “national laws, national control lists and other regulations and administrative measures.” For Article 13(3) the treaty states that annual reports “may contain the same information submitted by the State Party to relevant United Nations frameworks,” including the UN Register of Conventional Arms (UNROCA). In practice, this has meant that States Parties can provide information in their own national formats.
Soon after the ATT was adopted, States realized that differing national reports would pose a challenge to the ATT’s goals for confidence building and transparency and would challenge general understanding of treaty implementation. Two key benefits of a standard reporting template were realized: first, templates can assist States Parties in understanding the types of information required for comprehensive reporting. Second, informational consistency would enable more uniform analyses of reporting data and facilitate easy identification of implementation gaps and good practices. The November 2014 informal consultations for CSP1, which sought to establish an informal working group on reporting, included discussion on the development of standardized reporting templates. The newly-established Working Group on Transparency and Reporting (WGTR) developed initial and annual reporting templates that were endorsed and recommended for use by States Parties at CSP2.
The adoption of reporting templates helped facilitate analysis of treaty implementation, gaps, and good practices. However, for many years, steps were taken to try to improve the templates endorsed by CSP2. Working with States Parties, civil society organizations, and other relevant stakeholders, the WGTR drafted revised versions of the initial and annual reporting templates, which were endorsed by States Parties at CSP7.2 In their draft report to CSP7, the WGTR Co-Chairs noted that “the draft proposed changes to the templates address the most urgent clarifications, user-friendliness issues, gaps and inconsistencies identified in the current templates, and that the endorsement of such adjustments could significantly contribute to improving the quality of reporting in ATT.”3 Indeed, those States that intervened “expressed support for adjustments that take away ambiguous language and enhance the user friendliness of the templates.” For example, for the initial reports, States wanted to eliminate the rigidity of the reporting templates and allow for greater explanation of State practice.
Although reporting templates were adopted and then revised throughout the first decade of the ATT, neither the CSPs nor Secretariat have developed a process for measuring the utility of the reporting template, nor a metric for whether the new template is meeting objectives and fulfilling the ATT’s reporting promise. Thus, this report seeks to undertake some of that initial analysis and develop a methodology to evaluate the templates so that any potential template changes will improve the gaps and challenges of the current templates and support effective and comprehensive ATT reporting. This report does not pass judgement on whether States are choosing to be more or less transparent in their reporting. Indeed, there may be cases when states are trying to be as transparent as possible, but the nature of their transfer control processes are simply not aligned with the ATT templates. Thus, this report simply looks at the templates, their revisions, and efforts to develop an evaluative metric to interrogate whether the format of the template best lends itself to transparency.
This report is organized into four sections. The first section outlines the changes made in the CSP7 reporting templates. The second section looks at evaluative metrics for the reporting templates. The third section provides some preliminary insights into the first few years of the revised reporting template’s use. The final section provides some recommendations for improving the reporting templates and their use in the future. In short, this report attempts to examine the changes to the reporting template and provide some early analysis of their impact, as well as to develop a metric for evaluating the reporting templates and providing recommendations for future improvements.
“For a review of the utility of the original report templates (introduced at CSP2 in 2016), please see The ATT Reporting Templates: Challenges and Recommendations (2020).”
