UNITED NATIONS: A coalition of human rights and peace activists is urging the United Nations to adopt a legally binding "marking and tracing system" to track small arms from the factory to the user.

The coalition, which includes Amnesty International, Oxfam International and the International Action Network on Small Arms (IANSA), says that while weapons and ammunition often carry basic serial numbers, there is no worldwide system to record this information - thereby rendering it useless as a tool to identify, locate and trace illegal arms shipments.

The resistance by governments to a global system for tracking arms transfers has meant that "it is nearly impossible to prosecute people or hold governments accountable for illegally selling arms and breaking UN arms embargoes", says the report, titled "Tracing Lethal Tools" and released on Monday.

This is particularly evident in the legal and illegal sales of small arms, including handguns, assault rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers and anti-personnel landmines - described as the weapons of choice in today's conflicts.

The United Nations admits that small arms are primarily responsible for most of the deaths in the ongoing conflicts in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America and the Caribbean. But most of the world's major arms manufacturers are resisting attempts to create a legally binding UN convention that can track the weapons to their original suppliers.

Those countries selling arms illegally can simply claim ignorance of how the weapons ever ended up in the hands of killers, according to the report prepared jointly by the coalition.

"In order to hold governments, companies, and even individuals responsible when small arms and light weapons are used illegally, it is critical to have weapons biographies," says Natalie Goldring, executive director of the security studies programme at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

"The international community has the technology to ensure that every transfer of a weapon is recorded. This would allow tracking of weapons used in human rights abuses, as well as weapons used to perpetuate conflict at the local, national, and regional level," Goldring told IPS.

According to figures released by IANSA, there are about 640 million guns in circulation - one for every 10 people. Small arms are produced by 1,249 companies in more than 90 countries.

In some of these countries, trade controls on arms transfers are almost non-existent. In two of the world's biggest arms producing nations, the United States and Russia, production of military style guns is increasing.

"A piece of lost luggage can be tracked from San Francisco to Sierra Leone within hours, yet deadly weapons disappear without a trace on a daily basis," says Jeremy Hobbs, director of Oxfam International, in a statement released on Monday.

In the recent massacre in Gatumba in Burundi in which 150 people were killed, spent cartridges showed that the ammunition used in the attack was manufactured in China, Bulgaria and Serbia, according to the study.

However, the lack of any tracing mechanism meant it was impossible to prove how it got there. Had a tracing mechanism existed, those who sold the ammunition to the killers could have been held accountable and future supplies could have been stopped. -Dawn/The Inter Press News Service.