Abstract
Arms control and human rights have conventionally been seen and addressed as separate issues. Within the United Nations and other intergovernmental organizations, separate and siloed issue-area regimes have been constructed over several decades, with the effect that issues identified as belonging to one or the other of the two domains are discussed in different settings, by different actors, and with reference to different normative frameworks. Separate discourse communities have developed, with very little overlap in the way issues are framed and discussed. Issues identified as human rights concerns are typically taken up by the UN Human Rights Council or referred to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, with reference to core human rights treaties.1 Conventional arms control issues, on the other hand, are normally taken up by UN member states in the General Assembly’s First Committee, which deals with disarmament and international security. Some related issues, of course, may be addressed by the UN Security Council or at annual meetings of the Conference on Disarmament, or within less formal organizational settings, such as the Wassenaar Arrangement.2 To complicate matters further, during the first several decades following conclusion of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, humanitarian concerns and war crimes explicitly related to the body of international humanitarian law of war (IHL) were typically viewed as a third discrete issue area.
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© 2014 George Andreopoulos and Zehra F. Kabasakal Arat
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Waltz, S. (2014). Arms Transfers and the Human Rights Agenda. In: Andreopoulos, G., Arat, Z.F.K. (eds) The Uses and Misuses of Human Rights. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408341_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137408341_6
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