 Hi, I'm Susan Waltz, and for about 10 years I've been working on efforts to control the trade and transfer of small arms and light weapons. And last December, the United Nations General Assembly took a vote by 153 to 1, decided to begin serious work on an international arms trade treaty. For those of us who had been working on this issue, it was an unbelievably exciting moment. The issue of small arms and light weapons rose to the top of the international agenda towards the end of the 1990s, when it became apparent that these small, portable weapons had been used to fuel conflicts and were directly responsible for human rights catastrophes that had unfolded on the continent of Africa and elsewhere during the decade of the 1990s. So, my own involvement in this issue actually stemmed from this very period. In 1996 it became apparent that brokers and other outsiders, other people from outside the continent of Africa, had been bringing arms into places like Rwanda, and in fact there was evidence in 1996 from leading documents that weapons were being made available right in the middle of the Rwandan genocide, and the outsiders who had brought these weapons in were not going to be held responsible to any law. That outraged me, it outrages me still, and it's fueled my involvement in this issue. It's kept me working with non-governmental organizations. For a long time it seemed that these efforts were really pretty much doomed to be one more idealist aspiration, but in 2005 in January at the Ford School we ran a simulation of talks at the UN and the way that students played out their roles made me realize that it was really going to be possible to craft an agreement at the United Nations that could finally move this thing forward. Meetings in 2006, two of them, didn't really produce the results that we were hoping for, but when the United Nations General Assembly took up the issue last fall with their rules of majority rule voting, the vote actually went through, and now it appears that the United Nations is really prepared to take the steps necessary to get this dangerous trade under control. When we do finally get the treaty that we're looking for, it's going to mean that we're going to be able to control brokers, harmonize the laws that would make it possible for them to stand in national or international courts and be held responsible for their deeds, and it should also facilitate the marking and tracing of these weapons and other efforts to bring the illicit trade of small arms and light weapons under control.