Whatever its final form, that the 2014 United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) would be born of great compromise was not lost on anyone.
The ATT had to reconcile conflict between states’ sovereignty and their own legitimate security interests and collective security, international humanitarian law and even more problematically, international human rights law.
The ATT also had to navigate the basic fact that under international law, all states are sovereign equals, but in practice, there is extreme inequality when it comes to actual arms exports and imports.
