Balkan weapons for war zones through Swiss dealers
Goods category: War materiel
Public Domain – US Marine Corps
Effect of the proposed War Materiel Act revision
Under the new Article 22b, the Federal Council could depart from all the licensing criteria in Article 22a under vaguely defined ‘exceptional circumstances’. The public would not have to be informed. The Federal Council could add Iraq and Afghanistan to Annex 2 by amending the War Materiel Ordinance. This would remove the exclusion criterion based on participation in an armed conflict and make approval the rule. The Federal Council could refuse a licence only in exceptional cases. Article 18 paragraph 1 would abolish non-re-export declarations in the vast majority of cases. Weapons for Iraq and Afghanistan could thus easily be supplied through a subsidiary or intermediary in a third country. For example, the following states could serve as third countries, having supplied substantial quantities of war materiel in recent years according to SIPRI: Iraq: United States (3’948 million TIV); Afghanistan: United States (2’713 million TIV).
Countries
Conflicts
Companies
Time period
Transactions before the 2006 Amnesty report; subsequent procedural inquiries
Sources
- Amnesty International: Dead on Time, 2006, S. 112–118
- Amnesty International, 2006: Dead on Time: arms transportation, brokering and the threat to human rights, ACT 30/008/2006, S. 112–113 und 118
- NZZ am Sonntag, 04.10.2020, S. 18: Krieg ist sein Geschäft (Boas Ruh)
- magazin.nzz.ch, 03.10.2020: Wie ein Berner Bauer zu einem der grössten Waffenhändler der Welt wurde (Boas Ruh)