Sean Howard and Tammy Bernasky, Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative, Cape Breton University
The next six months present a unique opportunity to advance the disability-sensitive and disability-inclusive interpretation and implementation of the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT)—and, in doing so, meaningfully further the treaty’s humanitarian purpose.
Janet E. Lord delivering a civil society statement for the Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative at the UN General Assembly’s First Committee on Disarmament and International Security, October 17, 2025. Credit: Matthew Bolton, 2025.
Mid-March sees the first of three key pulses of momentum in Geneva this year in the review, development, and implementation of the ATT. From March 16-19, the treaty’s three Working Groups will meet, followed two months later by an Informal Preparatory Meeting (May 26-27) in advance of the annual Conference of States Parties (CSP12) from August 24-28. High on the ATT agenda throughout 2026 will be plans to establish the ATT’s first 5-Year Strategy by CSP13 in 2027. The strategy’s aim is to boost the treaty’s effectiveness and membership, currently standing at 116 states parties and 25 signatories. In recommending the development of a 5-year plan in 2024, the Stimson Center called for “a new set of objectives for the treaty’s second decade.” We believe that one of those “new objectives” should be the elevation and integration of the rights and perspectives of persons with disabilities in the treaty’s interpretation and implementation, in line with states’ obligations, both in spirit and letter, under the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
The ATT’s role in addressing human rights violations against persons with disabilities
At its humanitarian heart, the ATT is dedicated to “reducing human suffering”—namely, the preventable suffering caused by violence linked to the unregulated, underregulated, and poorly regulated transfers of weapons systems ranging from battle tanks, fighter jets, and warships to missile launchers and small arms and light weapons. In particular, the ATT requires states to assess the risk that transferred weapons could be used to “commit or facilitate” a range of harms under international law, including serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws, and, if they find risks, to mitigate them or reject the exports. Weapons-facilitated violence, by both state and non-state actors, inevitably causes and compounds a wide range of physical, psycho-social, and intellectual disabilities, and may also directly target or disproportionately affect persons with disabilities. These patterns, in turn, amount to serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law—which the ATT’s risk assessment is designed to prevent.
In addition, these same harms often amount to “serious acts of gender-based violence or serious acts of violence against women and children,” which ATT states parties must also consider under the treaty’s risk assessment. Some of these acts—including victimizing women and girls with disabilities as a matter of policy and as a consequence of prejudice—are committed in war zones. Others occur far from and long after battle or in peacetime. Together, these intersectional harms reverberate through patriarchal, racist, ableist cultures and structures reflecting the prevalence and privileging of rigidly binary gender stereotypes, damaging and dangerous to people with disabilities of all genders. And they run contrary to states’ obligations under both the ATT and international human rights law, including the CRPD.
One such harm is human trafficking, which is prohibited under international law. A human rights abuse frequently facilitated by weapons, human trafficking can and does violate a range of core obligations under international human rights law. It also disproportionatelyaffects women and children, including women and children with disabilities, amounting both to discrimination on the basis of gender and/or disability and to gender-based violence. Human trafficking is likewise broadly inconsistent with the CRPD, which prohibits “all forms of exploitation, violence and abuse, including their gender-based aspects.” With all of that in mind, weapons-facilitated human trafficking is thus precisely the kind of serious violation of international human rights law the ATT seeks to identify.
The CRPD, the arms trade, and peace and security
In addition to helping address the weapons-facilitated human rights violations that may affect persons with disabilities, the CRPD includes a broader set of protections. In particular, CRPD Article 11 obligates states parties to take “all necessary measures to ensure the protection and safety of persons with disabilities in situations of risk, including situations of armed conflict.” The availability of weapons represents a core threat to that protection and safety and is a direct source of harm to persons with disabilities. In addition, the CRPD requires states to protect persons with disabilities from exploitation, violence, and abuse, and to ensure their “full and effective participation and inclusion.” Read holistically, the CRPD arguably demands measures necessary not just to regulate but reduce as much as possible the trade in weapons, and to do so in consultation with persons with disabilities.
This read is consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2475 (2019), which calls for the protection of persons with disabilities in and from armed conflict, including by “addressing the root causes of armed conflicts to achieve sustainable peace and security.” The excessive and improperly regulated trade of weapons is among those root causes. Again in line with the CRPD, Res. 2475 notes that addressing these root causes effectively requires “the meaningful participation and representation of persons with disabilities, including their representative organizations, in humanitarian action, conflict prevention, resolution, reconciliation, reconstruction and peacebuilding, and to consult with those with expertise working on disability mainstreaming.”
This approach is likewise consistent the UN Charter, which calls for the “maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources.” Reducing the arms trade, and therefore preserving the world’s human and economic resources, would benefit all humanity. The resulting peace dividend would prove especially empowering for the most marginalized and at-risk groups in society, including persons with disabilities, who comprise at least one-sixth of the human family and are the world’s largest minority.
Next steps for disability rights and the ATT: mainstreaming and inclusion
The ATT has the potential to be a powerful tool in addressing weapons-linked harms against persons with disabilities. To do so, the treaty and its states parties must prioritize disability mainstreaming in its interpretation and implementation. This includes recognizing and welcoming the contributions that persons with disabilities can make in strengthening and enriching the ATT community and in ensuring the ATT delivers on its humanitarian promise. It also includes ensuring a disability rights-sensitive read of all ATT provisions—including, most importantly, the export prohibitions and risk assessment. Such mainstreaming would further the objectives of UNSC Res. 2475 and align the ATT with the CRPD as a whole, including the convention’s branching set of rights and freedoms rooted in “the universality, indivisibility, interdependence and interrelatedness of all human rights and fundamental freedoms,” fully respecting “the need for persons with disabilities to be guaranteed their full enjoyment without discrimination.”
Disability rights advocates might look for inspiration to how the ATT has addressed gender in its first decade. As a result of dogged advocacy from civil society and from state gender champions, the ATT’s interpretation and implementation are increasingly gender sensitive. This is vital both for providing effective protection to people of all genders and for challenging the patriarchal, masculinist—and ableist—stereotypes that drive the arms trade. Most recently, at CSP11, Mexico successfully proposed the establishment of gender focal points to “promote the systematic integration of gender perspectives across all ATT processes to support the treaty’s effective implementation, including by adopting a human rights-based approach that recognizes the differentiated impacts of armed violence based on gender.”
Advocates and states committed to the rights of persons with disabilities should pick up this mantle and demand a human-rights based approach to the ATT as a whole, which includes the mainstreaming of disability rights, perspectives, and involvement. Thanks to decisions made at CSP9, both states and civil society groups have the right to propose ad hoc topics for states parties to debate during ATT meetings. We believe that “disability rights and the arms trade” should be included as such an ad hoc topic. Doing so would help to concentrate and open minds on the ways disability issues relate to and can help advance the treaty’s goals. It will also allow for greater clarity regarding ATT states parties’ obligations to account for international law violations against persons with disabilities in fulfilling their treaty obligations and, by extension, how the ATT and CRPD can be brought into closer and more fruitful relation.
The ATT had the misfortune to begin its life in war-torn times, blighted by a surge in military spending and arms transfers that have in turn enabled atrocious human rights abuses in and beyond battle. Some of these abuses disproportionately affect or purposefully target persons with disabilities. Those abuses and others also create new and compound existing disabilities on a vast scale. The ATT provides the tools to address and prevent these harms, if only its provisions are implemented fully, using a human rights-based and disability-informed approach. But while the treaty is still far from fulfilling its humanitarian promise, its “mere presence” and its “institutionalization of the link between the arms trade, international law, and human suffering” is “an enormous normative achievement.” As a platform, the ATT is indispensable, and it is a platform that persons with disabilities can help us build on.
The authors are grateful to Jillian Rafferty, at the International Human Rights Clinic, Duke University School of Law, for her contribution to developing the piece.
This post expresses the views of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the Armed Conflict and Civilian Protection Initiative (ACCPI), Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, or Harvard University.
Sean Howard and Tammy Bernasky, Disability Rights and Disarmament Initiative, Cape Breton University
The next six months present a unique opportunity to advance the disability-sensitive and disability-inclusive interpretation and implementation of the 2013 Arms Trade Treaty (ATT)—and, in doing so, meaningfully further the treaty’s humanitarian purpose.
Mid-March sees the first of three key pulses of momentum in Geneva this year in the review, development, and implementation of the ATT. From March 16-19, the treaty’s three Working Groups will meet, followed two months later by an Informal Preparatory Meeting (May 26-27) in advance of the annual Conference of States Parties (CSP12) from August 24-28. High on the ATT agenda throughout 2026 will be plans to establish the ATT’s first 5-Year Strategy by CSP13 in 2027. The strategy’s aim is to boost the treaty’s effectiveness and membership, currently standing at 116 states parties and 25 signatories. In recommending the development of a 5-year plan in 2024, the Stimson Center called for “a new set of objectives for the treaty’s second decade.” We believe that one of those “new objectives” should be the elevation and integration of the rights and perspectives of persons with disabilities in the treaty’s interpretation and implementation, in line with states’ obligations, both in spirit and letter, under the 2006 UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD).
The ATT’s role in addressing human rights violations against persons with disabilities
At its humanitarian heart, the ATT is dedicated to “reducing human suffering”—namely, the preventable suffering caused by violence linked to the unregulated, underregulated, and poorly regulated transfers of weapons systems ranging from battle tanks, fighter jets, and warships to missile launchers and small arms and light weapons. In particular, the ATT requires states to assess the risk that transferred weapons could be used to “commit or facilitate” a range of harms under international law, including serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian laws, and, if they find risks, to mitigate them or reject the exports. Weapons-facilitated violence, by both state and non-state actors, inevitably causes and compounds a wide range of physical, psycho-social, and intellectual disabilities, and may also directly target or disproportionately affect persons with disabilities. These patterns, in turn, amount to serious violations of international human rights and humanitarian law—which the ATT’s risk assessment is designed to prevent.
In addition, these same harms often amount to “serious acts of gender-based violence or serious acts of violence against women and children,” which ATT states parties must also consider under the treaty’s risk assessment. Some of these acts—including victimizing women and girls with disabilities as a matter of policy and as a consequence of prejudice—are committed in war zones. Others occur far from and long after battle or in peacetime. Together, these intersectional harms reverberate through patriarchal, racist, ableist cultures and structures reflecting the prevalence and privileging of rigidly binary gender stereotypes, damaging and dangerous to people with disabilities of all genders. And they run contrary to states’ obligations under both the ATT and international human rights law, including the CRPD.
One such harm is human trafficking, which is prohibited under international law. A human rights abuse frequently facilitated by weapons, human trafficking can and does violate a range of core obligations under international human rights law. It also disproportionately affects women and children, including women and children with disabilities, amounting both to discrimination on the basis of gender and/or disability and to gender-based violence. Human trafficking is likewise broadly inconsistent with the CRPD, which prohibits “all forms of exploitation, violence and abuse, including their gender-based aspects.” With all of that in mind, weapons-facilitated human trafficking is thus precisely the kind of serious violation of international human rights law the ATT seeks to identify.
The CRPD, the arms trade, and peace and security
In addition to helping address the weapons-facilitated human rights violations that may affect persons with disabilities, the CRPD includes a broader set of protections. In particular, CRPD Article 11 obligates states parties to take “all necessary measures to ensure the protection and safety of persons with disabilities in situations of risk, including situations of armed conflict.” The availability of weapons represents a core threat to that protection and safety and is a direct source of harm to persons with disabilities. In addition, the CRPD requires states to protect persons with disabilities from exploitation, violence, and abuse, and to ensure their “full and effective participation and inclusion.” Read holistically, the CRPD arguably demands measures necessary not just to regulate but reduce as much as possible the trade in weapons, and to do so in consultation with persons with disabilities.
This read is consistent with UN Security Council Resolution 2475 (2019), which calls for the protection of persons with disabilities in and from armed conflict, including by “addressing the root causes of armed conflicts to achieve sustainable peace and security.” The excessive and improperly regulated trade of weapons is among those root causes. Again in line with the CRPD, Res. 2475 notes that addressing these root causes effectively requires “the meaningful participation and representation of persons with disabilities, including their representative organizations, in humanitarian action, conflict prevention, resolution, reconciliation, reconstruction and peacebuilding, and to consult with those with expertise working on disability mainstreaming.”
This approach is likewise consistent the UN Charter, which calls for the “maintenance of international peace and security with the least diversion for armaments of the world’s human and economic resources.” Reducing the arms trade, and therefore preserving the world’s human and economic resources, would benefit all humanity. The resulting peace dividend would prove especially empowering for the most marginalized and at-risk groups in society, including persons with disabilities, who comprise at least one-sixth of the human family and are the world’s largest minority.
Next steps for disability rights and the ATT: mainstreaming and inclusion
The ATT has the potential to be a powerful tool in addressing weapons-linked harms against persons with disabilities. To do so, the treaty and its states parties must prioritize disability mainstreaming in its interpretation and implementation. This includes recognizing and welcoming the contributions that persons with disabilities can make in strengthening and enriching the ATT community and in ensuring the ATT delivers on its humanitarian promise. It also includes ensuring a disability rights-sensitive read of all ATT provisions—including, most importantly, the export prohibitions and risk assessment. Such mainstreaming would further the objectives of UNSC Res. 2475 and align the ATT with the CRPD as a whole, including the convention’s branching set of rights and freedoms rooted in “the universality, indivisibility, interdependence and interrelatedness of all human rights and fundamental freedoms,” fully respecting “the need for persons with disabilities to be guaranteed their full enjoyment without discrimination.”
Disability rights advocates might look for inspiration to how the ATT has addressed gender in its first decade. As a result of dogged advocacy from civil society and from state gender champions, the ATT’s interpretation and implementation are increasingly gender sensitive. This is vital both for providing effective protection to people of all genders and for challenging the patriarchal, masculinist—and ableist—stereotypes that drive the arms trade. Most recently, at CSP11, Mexico successfully proposed the establishment of gender focal points to “promote the systematic integration of gender perspectives across all ATT processes to support the treaty’s effective implementation, including by adopting a human rights-based approach that recognizes the differentiated impacts of armed violence based on gender.”
Advocates and states committed to the rights of persons with disabilities should pick up this mantle and demand a human-rights based approach to the ATT as a whole, which includes the mainstreaming of disability rights, perspectives, and involvement. Thanks to decisions made at CSP9, both states and civil society groups have the right to propose ad hoc topics for states parties to debate during ATT meetings. We believe that “disability rights and the arms trade” should be included as such an ad hoc topic. Doing so would help to concentrate and open minds on the ways disability issues relate to and can help advance the treaty’s goals. It will also allow for greater clarity regarding ATT states parties’ obligations to account for international law violations against persons with disabilities in fulfilling their treaty obligations and, by extension, how the ATT and CRPD can be brought into closer and more fruitful relation.
The ATT had the misfortune to begin its life in war-torn times, blighted by a surge in military spending and arms transfers that have in turn enabled atrocious human rights abuses in and beyond battle. Some of these abuses disproportionately affect or purposefully target persons with disabilities. Those abuses and others also create new and compound existing disabilities on a vast scale. The ATT provides the tools to address and prevent these harms, if only its provisions are implemented fully, using a human rights-based and disability-informed approach. But while the treaty is still far from fulfilling its humanitarian promise, its “mere presence” and its “institutionalization of the link between the arms trade, international law, and human suffering” is “an enormous normative achievement.” As a platform, the ATT is indispensable, and it is a platform that persons with disabilities can help us build on.
The authors are grateful to Jillian Rafferty, at the International Human Rights Clinic, Duke University School of Law, for her contribution to developing the piece.
This post expresses the views of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the Armed Conflict and Civilian Protection Initiative (ACCPI), Harvard Law School’s International Human Rights Clinic, or Harvard University.
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