The Wassenaar Arrangement is a co-operative arrangement established to contribute to regional and international security and stability by promoting transparency and greater responsibility in transfer of conventional arms and dual use goods and technologies, thus preventing destabilising accumulations. Representatives of 28 states, the EU Fifteen, Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, the Russian Federation, the Slovak Republic, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States, agreed in the Netherlands on 19 December 1995 to establish the Wassenaar Arrangement on the basis of a set of purposes and procedures, termed "Initial Elements", which would be submitted to governments for approval. They agreed to locate the secretariat of the Wassenaar Arrangement in Vienna and established a preparatory committee whose report was available to the first plenary meeting of the new Arrangement on 3-4 April.
At the April meeting, Argentina, Romania and the Republic of Korea were admitted as founder members of the Wassenaar Arrangement. While there are still a number of candidates for admission, the participants in the arrangement already include all the major exporters of conventional arms and relevant dual use goods and technologies, with the exception of China. This means that the arrangement has the potential to play an important role in shaping international restraint in exports of arms and conventional weapons-related dual use goods in the future, through the mechanisms of information exchange and peer review. Ireland is, therefore, keen to see the arrangement in place and operational at the earliest possible date. In this connection, exploiting the potential of information exchange among participating countries on their arms exports in the seven categories of the UN Register of Conventional Arms should have priority; in the first instance, over extending the scope of the arrangement to include, for example, transfers of light weapons.
As full consensus on the Initial Elements of the Arrangement was not reached at the Vienna plenary meeting in April, the meeting is scheduled to resume on 10-12 July. Provided full agreement is reached at the start of next week's meeting on outstanding points in the Initial Elements, including the question of whether notifications in certain circumstances will apply to licences or to transfers, the position on the questions of structure and organisation raised by the Deputy should also be clarified.
