The Arms Trade Treaty Regime in International Institutional Law

By the end of 2014, the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) will enter into force, creating new treaty organs that will further develop international institutional law as it applies to these quasi-international organizations. The states parties to the ATT did not create a new international organization to support the treaty regime, but instead created treaty organs to do the same task, specifically the Conference of States Parties (CSP) and the Secretariat. While the creation of international organizations was once seen as the best solution, states are increasingly attracted to the creation of treaty organs instead. The emergence of yet more treaty organs into the already crowded field shows that this approach may now be the dominant method for giving effect to bureaucratic regimes, displacing the older preference for formal international organizations. In creating these organs, the states parties to the ATT are drawing on several decades’ worth of experience with these bodies and the initial steps taken already show that the ATT organs will continue and buttress crystallizing international practice on treaty organs. This article will review the text of the ATT pertinent to the treaty organs and place the new regime into a comparative study of similar treaty organs. It will also contribute to the scholarship on treaty organs by functionally applying international institutional law to these entities. This approach is not merely a wish; rather, it represents the current practice regarding these organs, as evidenced through the wide-ranging comparative study of the application of international institutional law.