UN Programme of Action on SALW

The United Nations Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects (commonly the UN PoA) was adopted by consensus at the UN Conference on the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons held in New York from 9–20 July 2001. It is the principal global framework addressing the proliferation of SALW, which the UN has linked to the majority of conflict deaths, organized crime, and instability in fragile states.

The PoA is politically binding rather than legally binding. States commit to a range of national, regional, and global measures, including:

• Establishing national coordination agencies and points of contact on SALW.
• Enacting laws criminalizing illicit manufacture, possession, stockpiling, and trade.
• Marking weapons at manufacture and import for traceability.
• Maintaining records of production, holdings, and transfers.
• Managing stockpiles securely and destroying surplus or confiscated arms.
• Cooperating on border control, brokering controls, and disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration (DDR) programmes.

The PoA is reviewed through Biennial Meetings of States (BMS) and Review Conferences (RevCons) held roughly every six years. A complementary instrument, the International Tracing Instrument (ITI), was adopted by the General Assembly in 2005 to operationalize marking, recordkeeping, and tracing cooperation. Reporting is voluntary, and submissions vary in quality and frequency.

The PoA's scope is limited: it explicitly addresses only the illicit trade and does not regulate the legal arms trade — a gap partly filled by the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT, 2013). Civil society has also criticized the exclusion of ammunition and of civilian possession from the PoA's core obligations, both of which were contested at the 2001 conference, particularly by the United States. Despite these limits, the PoA remains the central normative reference for SALW control and informs SDG Target 16.4 on reducing illicit arms flows.