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Arms Trade Litigation Monitor

Resisting the Arms Trade, Reviving Antimilitarist Movements

As part of our work on international violence and antimilitarism we have co-created the Arms Trade Litigation Monitor (ATLM) together with Saferworld and with support from the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). The monitor is the first comprehensive resource on movement lawyering against arms transfers and is part of the push for centring transformative approaches to arms trade and conflict accountability.

ATLM is a comprehensive repository for information on international, regional and domestic laws, case summaries, original court documents (including unofficial translations), legal and policy commentary and other carefully curated resources. The monitor documents and analyses legal proceedings related to the international arms trade examining their effects on international arms transfers. The majority of Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) - based proceedings are related to the mass violence taking place in Yemen; the monitor currently also includes a legal challenge related to Egypt.

The monitor is the culmination of a multiyear collaborative process with a community of legal practitioners and advocates involved in legal challenges against arms transfers that began in a first convening in London in September 2019. Since the ATT came into force, just months before the Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen, strategic litigation exposed the ways in which the ATT-based international regulatory regime fails to prevent clearly unlawful arms transfers and hold arms-suppliers as conflict actors to account.

As part of the site, we are developing a webinar series and other text and audio-visual materials on different perspectives on past and ongoing struggles to resist the irresponsible arms trade and the legal systems that enable it, and to uplift the agendas for social change of anti-militarist and peace movements.

We are working on two further ongoing projects in this area to co-design a transformative justice agenda for arms trade accountability, and to support the establishment of a people’s tribunal on the global arms trade.


Launch Events


The ATLM was launched at a first event in Brussels and reflected on the increasing use of legal mechanisms to challenge arms transfers that fuel and condition armed conflict and mass violence, and consider their impact on the field of arms control.

A second launch event will take place in Geneva, Switzerland during Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) week on 11th of May 2023.

Register here

Details to follow, here and on Twitter @EJC_org.
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