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11. Conventional arms control and the regulation of inhumane weapons
Contents
I. Introduction
II. The use and multilateral regulation of inhumane weapons and other conventional weapons of humanitarian concern
III. Control of small arms and light weapons
IV. International transparency in arms procurement and military expenditure as confidence-building measures
V. Conclusions
The main multilateral treaty for regulating inhumane weapons is the 1981 Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) Convention. There are also separate conventions on anti-personnel mines (APMs) and cluster munitions. A small number of states that have chosen to retain, develop or use weapons seen as inhumane by others have repeatedly vetoed or stalled progress on strengthening the CCW regime. Other categories of conventional weapons that raise humanitarian concerns, such as small arms and light weapons, are dealt with by other legal and political processes.
Cluster munitions and anti-personnel mines
The humanitarian consequences of cluster munitions—which scatter submunitions over a wide and irregular area, not all of which immediately detonate—and the harm that such weapons cause to civilians are addressed by the 2008 Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM). No new states joined the CCM in 2024, but one of the 112 states parties (Lithuania) started the process to withdraw. This decision was unprecedented: no state has ever with-drawn from any of the five key global treaties that ban an entire category of weapons—the CCM, the 1997 APM Convention, the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the 1993 Chemical Weapons Convention and the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons—or from the landmark 1949 Geneva Conventions or their 1977 Additional Protocols.
Ukraine was the only country in the world where cluster munitions were used extensively in 2024, principally by Russia but also by Ukraine. The United States supplied Ukraine with an unspecified quantity of cluster munitions in 2024, and in November 2024 broke a de facto global ban on the international transfer of APMs in effect since the mid 1990s by supplying US-made APMs to Ukraine.
Explosive weapons in populated areas
The use of explosive weapons in populated areas (EWIPA) continued to be widespread in major armed conflicts in 2024, with particularly devastating effects in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Lebanon, Myanmar, Pakistan, Palestine (Gaza), Sudan, Syria and Ukraine. A political declaration that was adopted in 2022 by 83 states seeks to address the humanitarian consequences of the use of EWIPA. The first follow-up conference in 2024 reaffirmed the declaration’s importance and aimed to strengthen its implementation.
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