AlterNet: European Arms Manufacturers Pump Weapons into Troubled Regions - by David Cronia

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European Arms Manufacturers Pump Weapons into Troubled Regions

Despite the EU code of conduct, European corporations continue to supply the world's most dangerous groups with arms. A stronger law is needed.Located in the west of the country, Eldoret is also home to an ammunition factory opened in the mid-1990s by the Belgian company FN Herstal. The plant has been blamed earlier for providing supplies to armed factions in the genocide that swept through Rwanda in 1994. Now Amnesty International has documented human rights violations by Kenyan forces using weapons manufactured at the same site. The continued involvement of a firm from the European Union in Kenya comes despite a decade-old EU code of conduct on arms sales. The code stipulates that licenses to export weapons cannot be issued if there is a threat they will be used for internal repression or in armed conflicts. But because the bullets in Eldoret are made outside the EU, they are not covered by the code.

The EU's governments agreed in 2005 to make compliance with it mandatory. Yet the formal steps needed to give effect to that decision have not yet been taken, largely due to the stance adopted by France. Paris has indicated it would only be prepared to agree to upgrade the code's legal status when an EU arms embargo on China, imposed after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, is lifted.