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epresentatives from 30 Asia-Pacific countries gathered in Bali on Monday to discuss arms transfers and ways to improve controls through a new international legally binding instrument — the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) — currently being negotiated at the UN.

The Bali meeting is part of a process to strengthen the negotiations leading up to the adoption of the treaty at a UN conference in 2012 by ensuring an inclusive process by allowing countries to make recommendations.

Ambassador Julian Wilson, head of the EU delegation to Indonesia, said the need to start negotiating an ATT was compelling considering that the unregulated and uncontrolled spread of conventional arms continues to pose a serious threat to global peace and security.

“Most international, regional and national efforts in recent years have targeted the illicit trade in weapons as one of the most daunting challenges to our security.

“However, thorough analysis of global trends shows that a significant part of weapons smuggled in the black market has entered the global trade through legal channels just to be illegally diverted to unintended or unauthorized users.”

Wilson said there were elaborate networks of illicit arms suppliers involved in diverting weapons from legal to illegal markets that can lead to potential conflicts and human rights violations.

Despite the large number of existing regional, national and international export control instruments, controls over the global arms trade remains incomplete as the instruments are not apt to address the global phenomenon of the arms trade, allowing significant amounts of weapons to be traded on the black market and supplied to countries and non-state actors, which contributes to instability and conflicts, he said.

In the arms trade, there are vast commercial interests at play, with an estimated 3 percent of the world’s GDP devoted to military expenditures.

Wilson said the ATT should meet the expectations of the international community by finding a common ground for outstanding issues and different national approaches because each UN member state has its own approach to conventional arms transfer controls. Some would be more concerned about export regulations for certain types of weapons, while others would focus on controls on transit and brokerage.

Dominicus Supratikto, the Foreign Ministry’s deputy director general of multilateral affairs, said Indonesia supports the ATT as an international instrument to prevent the diversion of arms from legal to illicit trade and to control the transfer of arms for terrorist acts and organized crime.

He said the treaty should establish common and binding standards that must be applied to assess transfers of international weapons.

“The ATT framework should recognize four rights of states on the same footing: the right to self-defense, to manufacture and transfer arms, to regulate internally arms arrangement and the right to territorial integrity.”

Christiane Agboton, deputy director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, said each region should make a specific contribution by taking into account their specificities in order to have an inclusive process for a strong ATT that is practical and able to be implemented by any state.