The challenges of monitoring illicit firearms trafficking flows

On November 29 and 30, the Latin American Meeting on data collection and analysis on illicit firearms trafficking was held in Panama City, Panama. The meeting was organized by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Regional Office for Central America and the Caribbean in Panama (ROPAN) within the framework of the Global Firearms Programme.

The meeting participants presented their experiences in the measurement of illicit firearms trafficking and discussed about the legal and inter-institutional cooperation challenges that persist and make it difficult to report information on this flow. Experts from 14 countries of the region participated in the meeting (Argentina, Panama, Chile, Uruguay, Peru, Brazil, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Bolivia, Cuba, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Costa Rica). The countries also jointly reviewed a draft questionnaire to measure firearms trafficking in the framework of the 2030 Agenda Indicator 16.4.2 Proportion of seized, found or surrendered arms whose illicit origin or context has been traced or established by a competent authority in line with international instruments. The Center of Excellence presented the work of UNODC in data collection, emphasizing the importance of methodological development in measuring criminal phenomena in order to have comparable data.