Launch of Arms TRACK: A New Tool to Support the Arms Trade Treaty

The Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights is pleased to announce the launch of a new project to support the implementation of the Arms Trade Treaty. Combining research into weapons that are especially dangerous to civilians and assessments of the conduct of armed forces and the police in importing States, Arms TRACK will serve as an operational tool for all arms exporters. A traffic-light system will offer alerts on both general and weapons-specific concerns. Using resources from its innovation fund, the new Academy portal will be online after the summer. It will ultimately cover all 197 actual or potential importing States.

The project responds to an urgent need. From Gaza to Sudan to Yemen, the supply of weapons continues to fuel violence against civilians, with widespread violations of international humanitarian law (IHL) and international human rights law. The Arms Trade Treaty (ATT), to which 118 States are party, seeks to prevent conventional weapons from reaching parties that would misuse them — yet implementation across States Parties has been uneven. At the same time, a major global rearmament drive in the coming years is expected to significantly increase weapons production worldwide.

Arms TRACK will address this gap through two core components. The first is a Weapons Risk Repository — a comprehensive catalogue of conventional weapons categories covering targeting accuracy, fragmentation, incendiary effects, and other risks to civilians across all UN Register of Conventional Arms categories, as well as small arms, light weapons, and munitions. The second is a set of State Conduct Assessments, providing detailed evaluations of armed forces and law enforcement in importing States, measuring compliance with IHL and the law of law enforcement both generally and with respect to specific weapons systems.

The portal is grounded in the legal obligations of exporting States under Articles 6 and 7 of the ATT, and is designed to integrate with existing Geneva Academy platforms, including RULAC, IHL in Focus, and War WATCH. It is led by Stuart Casey-Maslen, Head of Scientific Projects at the Academy, who is also co-authoring a new legal commentary on the ATT to be published by Oxford University Press in early 2027.