By Anis Chowdhury
SYDNEY, Jan 13 2025 – Thank God, we have survived another year of genocide, war, destruction and climate crisis. The passing year of 2024 has been a mixture of hope and despair. It began with some hope as the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled in favour of South Africa’s case against Israel for committing genocide and ordered Israel to take all measures within its power to prevent the commission of all acts within the scope of Article II of the Genocide Convention, and to take immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

Anis Chowdhury

Alas, the hope quickly vanished as the genocide continues by the very people who promised, “never again” and worked tirelessly for the Genocide Convention. Officially, more than 45,000 killed – mostly women and children. According to the prestigious medical journal Lancet, the actual death toll by July 2024 reached more than 186,000 due to the cumulative effects of Israel’s destruction of hospitals, blocking of aid, cutting off water & electricity supplies and every other means of ethnic cleansing.

Ironically, it is possible for the apartheid state of Israel to trample on the ICJ and the international humanitarian laws only because of its backing by the US and its allies. One grapples with the inexplicable spectacle of its stone-faced Western allies ignoring, and indeed justifying, the slaughter and starvation of Palestinians in Gaza.

I wrote three pieces for IPS trying to explain the inexplicable – Gaza Massacre and Western Hypocrisy (4 Mar., 2024); ‘Unbounded’ Impunity Emboldens Israel (27 Feb., 2024) and The West’s Frankenstein Moment (14 Feb., 2024). Amidst the continued horror, injustice and the miseries of the occupied Palestinian people, I thought it was pointless to write or make academic analyses.

Instead, I opted for activism and joined the mass protests that became a regular feature around the world, loudly and defiantly declaring, “From the River to the sea, Palestine will be free”, where the two – Palestinians and Jewish people – will live as free citizens, enjoying full democratic and economic rights to realise their full potential as equal human beings.

My children and grandchildren also joined as we drew inspiration from the resilience of the Palestinians, refusing to surrender and demanding to live with dignity.

It seems people power is beginning to have some positive impact. More countries, especially in the Global South, are taking a firm stance against the apartheid state of Israel; breaking with their Western allies. Norway, Ireland, Spain and Slovenia recognized the State of Palestine. Australia changed its position to support a vote at the UN demanding Israel end the occupation of Gaza, East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

Yet, there were more disappointing events: Israel expanded its ruthless bombing to Lebanon and assassinated key figures, eliminating likely partners in a possible peace deal; the war in Ukraine became more protracted while Putin threatens to use nuclear war-heads. And the US, the supposed leader of the so-called rule-based ‘free world’, elected a narcissist, Donald Trump, as its President, bent on wrecking the rules, claiming US supremacy and exceptionalism. The CoP29 climate summit ended with disappointment as the world’s most vulnerable nations have been abandoned, and there has been little progress on reducing fossil fuels.

The fate of the displaced people in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere became worse, as conflict drags on. Amnesty International reported, “the Arakan Army unlawfully killed Rohingya civilians, drove them from their homes and left them vulnerable to attacks. These attacks faced by the Rohingya come on top of indiscriminate air strikes by the Myanmar military that have killed both Rohingya and ethnic Rakhine civilians”.

The Rohingya people – the world’s largest stateless population – continue to face persecution and abuse. They now face a double-edged sword as the Arakan Army tightens the noose around Myanmar’s Junta.

Conflict in Sudan has led to a man-made famine, the world’s largest hunger crisis, and the worst internal displacement crisis in the world. Nearly 20 months of war has made more than one-fifth of the country, over 12 million people, displaced from their homes.

Nevertheless, there have been some sparks of hope. The heroic people of Syria and Bangladesh overthrew their repressive regimes, which seemed almost impossible the day before; and it appears a new dawn has come for these nations.

People in both Syria and Bangladesh are hoping for a just, equitable and democratic society. However, they are also genuinely apprehensive as such a systemic transition is fraught with uncertainty. It is like a caterpillar’s morphosis inside a cocoon – it can come out either as a butterfly or as a moth.

The shadow of the failed ‘Arab Spring’ in Egypt, Algeria and Tunisia haunts the Syrian people. They also fear the sectarian conflict and big-power games that followed in Libya as Israel pounds and expands its occupation.

In the case of Bangladesh, the last three attempts at systemic transition have ended in disappointments. The high hope for a democratic, just society evaporated quickly as the country witnessed unprecedented extra-judicial killings, vote rigging and finally turning into a one-party state within about 3 years of its independence earned at the cost of millions of lives. The second attempt post 1975 was skidded by Ershad’s coup whose military-civilian regime was neither a butterfly nor a moth – rather a hybrid. Then the third attempt post 1990, turned into a monster with the tyrant Hasina’s kleptocratic rule by theft and extreme repression.

Despair must not overtake hope. Human history is the stories of struggles; but our ability to rise after every fall, to emerge from the depths of despair with new found determination and unwavering hope determines our progress.

Anis Chowdhury, Emeritus Professor, Western Sydney University (Australia). Held senior United Nations positions in New York and Bangkok. E-mail: anis.z.chowdhury@gmail.com

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By Kanni Wignaraja
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 13 2025 – Nature is taking the stand as courtrooms worldwide become battlegrounds for Earth’s rights. The rise in climate litigation shows how the environment can take centre stage as a plaintiff, demanding justice and accountability, benefiting us all.

On 23 October 2024, India’s Supreme Court declared a pollution-free environment a fundamental right, underscoring the government’s duty to provide clean air and water. In April 2024, the European Court of Human Rights ruled against the Swiss State for inadequate climate action, affirming climate change as a human rights issue.

Since 2017, climate change court cases have surged, particularly in the US, but increasingly worldwide. Cases tripled from 884 in 2017 to 2,540 in 2023, with about 17 percent now occurring in developing countries, including small island developing states. The legal landscape is evolving, with significant rulings in Asia and the Pacific driving change. This is an area where UNDP is providing crucial support.

Kanni Wignaraja

Early and groundbreaking work

For an example of climate justice pioneering, we can turn to 2010 to India’s National Green Tribunal and the Philippines’ Writ of Kalikasan (Kalikasan means Nature in Filipino language). This unique legal instrument – whose design was supported by UNDP – enables citizens to protect environmental rights by filing swift, accessible court petitions addressing ecological damages affecting multiple regions.

It allows immediate judicial intervention to safeguard balanced and healthy ecosystems. For example, it has been used to close dumpsites and illegal landfills, prompt the rehabilitation of Manila Bay, and order the listing of non-environmentally friendly plastic products.

Similarly, courts in Pakistan have adopted a “climate justice” perspective, forming a climate change commission. A notable case involved seven-year-old Rabab Ali, who challenged plans to expand coal production in the Thar desert, focusing on intergenerational equity in climate actions. Pakistan was also one of the main proponents of the Loss and Damage concept, when it was first tabled.

What are the emerging trends in climate litigation we are seeing now?

Following the landmark Paris Agreement in 2015, activists and citizens worldwide are increasingly turning to courts for climate solutions, spurring innovative legal approaches and rethinking what climate justice means. Key trends include:

Human rights-related to environmental assets and protections: Courts are recognizing the connection between climate change and human rights, boosting protections and accountability. Many courts now interpret constitutional rights to include environmental protections.

Intergenerational equity: Cases by youth emphasize the unequal impact of climate change on future generations and how climate justice is one of the main advocacy issues for youth worldwide.

Corporate accountability: Courts extending climate obligations to businesses.

Innovative legal concepts: New principles like “water justice” and recognizing nature’s legal rights are gaining traction, for example trees as living beings.

“Activists and citizens worldwide are increasingly turning to courts for climate solutions, spurring innovative legal approaches and rethinking what climate justice means.”

Thanks to the leading role of the Pacific Island State of Vanuatu at the UN General Assembly, now the International Court of Justice is hearing a landmark case on climate justice – its largest case ever – to determine what countries and companies are obliged to do under international law to protect the climate and environment from human-caused greenhouse gas emissions; and to determine the legal consequences for governments, where their acts or lack of action have significantly harmed the climate and environment.

The court’s advisory opinion can be expected to influence climate-related legal action and policy for decades to come.  These legal advances compel the public and private sectors to consider and define more ambitious climate goals, offering citizens and activists new paths to enforce accountability.

What’s next for UNDP?

For UNDP, this is not only an area that requires urgent action but also a natural point of thematic convergence that brings together two of our areas of expertise: climate action and governance. UNDP is actively supporting courts in tackling these novel cases.

For example, our global strategy for environmental justice (2022) aims to increase accountability and protection of environmental rights for current and future generations, as well as promote environmental rule of law. The strategy is based on a three-pronged approach: establishing enabling legal frameworks: supporting people-centred, effective institutions; and increasing access to justice and legal empowerment.

UNDP’s Nature Pledge has a key target of strengthening environmental justice frameworks in 50 countries. This is yielding concrete results. For example, in Thailand, UNDP partnered with the Judicial Training Institute for Climate Justice training, equipping judges with climate impact insights.

By supporting innovative legal concepts, we help justice actors advocate for new legal principles like “water justice,” aiding courts in novel environmental cases. UNDP has also supported ASEAN countries with an Environmental Justice Needs Assessment.

Through its Justice Futures CoLab, UNDP advances the right to a healthy environment and addresses injustices, supporting courts in climate justice efforts. Judicial systems are becoming key players in climate action, with the potential to address issues of climate migration, Indigenous rights, financing and extreme weather liabilities.

Climate justice will also be a critical factor under the proposed loss and damage mechanism, where UNDP, with national and international partners, supports countries with taxonomy, valuation of natural assets, damage assessments and strengthen the capacities of the courts to hear and manage these cases. Social awareness and citizens’ participation on issues of climate justice is another line of engagement.

As our climate and nature related “events” intensify, so will this trend towards seeking justice, legal and financial recourse. Ensure the systems and people involved are well prepared and discerning in this relatively new arena will serve everyone, including the environment as plaintiff in the midst of it all.

Kanni Wignaraja is UN Assistant Secretary-General and UNDP Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific

Source UNDP

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By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Pakistan, Jan 13 2025 – “She was at her brilliant best, speaking fearlessly and boldly about the treatment of women by the Afghan Taliban, robbing an entire generation of girls their future, and how they want to erase them from society,” said educationist and one of the speakers, Baela Raza Jamil, referring to the speech by Nobel Laureate and education activist Malala Yousafzai.

Jamil heads Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi, an organization promoting progressive education.

Malala addressed the second day of a two-day international conference organized by the Pakistan Ministry of Federal Education and Professional Training (MoFE&PT) on January 11 and 12, to discuss the challenges and opportunities for girls’ education in Muslim communities.

“They are violators of human rights, and no cultural or religious excuse can justify them,” said Malala. “Let’s not legitimize them.”

Pop singer and education activist Shehzad Roy was equally impressed.

Roy said, “When she speaks, she speaks from the heart.”

It has been a little over three years since the Taliban banned secondary education for girls in Afghanistan on September 17, shortly after their return to power in August 2021. In 2022, the Taliban put a ban on women studying in colleges, and then in December 2024, this was extended to include women studying nursing, midwifery and dentistry.

In October 2012, at 15, Malala survived a Taliban assassination attempt for advocating girls’ education in Mingora, Pakistan. She was flown to England for treatment and has since settled there with her family while facing continued Taliban threats.

Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy, a university professor and columnist, acknowledged that the treatment of girls and women in Afghanistan was essentially “primitive and barbaric,” but emphasized that “before the Pakistani government takes on the mantle of being their [Afghan women’s] liberator, there are laws relating to women (in Pakistan) that need to be changed and anti-women practices that need to be dismantled.”

Syani Saheliyan project, which helped nearly 50,000 adolescent girls by providing academic, life skills, vocational training, and technology-driven support to reintegrate Courtesy: Idara-e-Taleem-o-Aagahi

Dismantling many of the colonial laws and legal systems that perpetuate gender inequality at both personal and societal levels was also pointed out by Jamil, who spoke about the important role women can play in peacebuilding. But that was only possible, she said, when society can promote education and lifelong learning without discrimination.

“In Malala, we have a living example of a contemporary young student’s lived experience of responding to deadly violence by becoming a unique peacebuilder,” said Jamil in her speech to the conference.

This high-profile conference deliberately kept low-key till the last minute for “security reasons gathered 150 delegates, including ministers, ambassadors, scholars, and representatives from 44 Muslim and allied countries, as well as international organizations like UNESCO, UNICEF, the World Bank, and the Saudi-funded Muslim World League.

Hoodbhoy, however, said the summit was “solely purposed to break Pakistan’s isolation with the rest of the world and shore up a wobbly government desperate for legitimacy.”

While some Indian organizations were represented, Afghanistan, despite being invited, was conspicuously absent.

This did not go unnoticed.

“The silence of the Taliban, the world’s worst offender when it comes to girls’ education, was deafening,” pointed out Michael Kugelman, director of the Washington D.C.-based Wilson Center’s South Asia Institute. Given the strained relationship between Pakistan and Afghanistan, he said the former may have wanted this conference to bring attention to the Taliban’s horrific record on girls’ education.

“And it has succeeded, to a degree, especially with an iconic figure like Malala using the conference as a platform to condemn gender apartheid in Afghanistan under the Taliban.”

Yusafzai was glad that the conference was taking place in Pakistan. “Because there is still a tremendous amount of work that is ahead of us, so that every Pakistani girl can have access to her education,” she said, referring to the 12 million out-of-school girls.

Kugelman credited Pakistan as the host for not trying “to hide its own failures” on the education front. “It was important that Prime Minister Sharif acknowledged the abysmal state of girls’ education in Pakistan in his conference speech,” he said.

With 26 million out-of-school children in Pakistan, 53 percent of whom are girls, the summit seemed to be in line with Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif’s declaration of an education emergency in Pakistan last year, vowing to “bring them [unschooled children] back to school.”

“The PM is rightly worried about out-of-school kids, but I’m more worried about those who complete ten years of education and fail to develop critical thinking,” said Roy, commenting on the summit. The pop singer has been a very vocal education activist for over two decades.

Hoodbhoy had similar thoughts. “Had there been serious intent to educate girl children, the more effective and far cheaper strategies would be to make coeducation compulsory at the primary and early secondary levels to increase school availability and design curriculum to educate and inform girls (and boys) rather than simply brainwash,” he said.

Pop singer and education activist Shehzad Roy is concerned with the quality of education. Courtesy: Shehzad Roy

Roy stated that Yousafzai has consistently emphasized the importance of quality education. With just 150 government training institutions in Pakistan, he said there was an urgent need for reform through public-private partnerships. He also noted that many private schools hire unqualified teachers and advocated for a teaching license, like medical licenses.

Since forming the Zindagi Trust in 2003, Roy has been advocating for better quality education in public schools. He has also adopted two government girl’s schools in Karachi and turned them around, providing meals to nursery children and teaching chess and musical instruments, both unheard of in public schools, especially for girls.

The Prime Minister acknowledged that enrolling 26 million students in school was a challenging task, with “inadequate infrastructure, safety concerns, as well as deeply entrenched societal norms” acting as barriers, and stated that the real challenge was the “will” to do it.

For 34 years, Jamil has raised questions about the design and process of education in Pakistan through annual reports. She believes that bringing 26 million children back to school is less challenging than ensuring “foundational learning” for those already enrolled. “Forty-five percent of children aged 5-16 fail in reading, comprehension, and arithmetic,” she told IPS. Along with improved funding and well-equipped school infrastructure, Jamil was also concerned about what she termed a runaway population.

Lamenting on a “lack of imagination to solve the education crisis” within the government, she said there was potential to achieve so much more. Jamil’s own organisation’s 2018 Syani Saheliyan project helped nearly 50,000 adolescent girls (ages 9-19) in South Punjab who had dropped out of school. It provided academics, life skills, vocational training, and technology-driven support to reintegrate them into education. The project was recognized by HundrEd Innovation in 2023.

Even Dr. Fozia Parveen, assistant professor at Aga Khan University’s Institute for Educational Development, would like the government to think outside the box and find a “middle ground” by including local wisdom in modern education.

“Instead of western-led education in an already colonial education system, perhaps a more grassroots approach using local methods of education can be looked into,” she suggested, adding: “There is so much local wisdom and knowledge that we will lose if we continue to be inspired by and adopt foreign systems. An education that is localized with all modern forms and technologies is necessary for keeping up with the world,” she said.

Further, Parveen, who looks at environmental and climate education, said “more skill-based learning would be needed in the times to come, which would require updated curriculum and teachers that are capacitated to foster those skills.”

The two-day International Conference on Girls’ Education in Muslim Communities ended with the signing of the Islamabad Declaration, recognizing education as a fundamental right protected by divine laws, Islamic teachings, international charters, and national constitutions. Muslim leaders pledged to ensure girls’ right to education, “without limitations” and “free from restrictive conditions,” in line with Sharia. The declaration highlighted girls’ education as a religious and societal necessity, key to empowerment, stable families, and global peace, while addressing extremism and violence.

It condemned extremist ideologies, fatwas, and cultural norms hindering girls’ education and perpetuating societal biases. Leaders committed to offering scholarships for girls affected by poverty and conflict and developing programs for those with special needs to ensure inclusivity.

The declaration concluded by affirming “it will not be a temporary appeal, an empty declaration, or simply a symbolic stance. Rather, it will represent a qualitative transformation in advocating for girls’ education—bringing prosperity to every deprived girl and to every community in dire need of the contributions of both
its sons and daughters equally”.

A permanent committee was urged to oversee the implementation of these outcomes.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO, Jan 13 2025 – The case of a man arrested in Texas, in the south of the United States, for shipping arms parts to Mexico immediately caught the attention of authorities in both countries. But it was only one thread in a web that continues to become more and more tangled.

At a binational meeting in early October, following the inauguration of leftist President Claudia Sheinbaum on 1 October, Mexicans complained to their counterparts about the flow of gun parts through online shops and the United States postal service into Mexico.

The host, the Mexican government, briefed the United States government on the issue and asked for more measures to control the smuggling, including uniform shipping codes to make it easier to identify packages and confiscate them, which Washington has so far rejected.“Most trafficked weapons are obtained by dozens or hundreds of proxy buyers who conduct multiple transactions of low quantities of weapons, which are then trafficked across the border in large quantities of small shipments, usually in private cars. Detection and interdiction of these shipments is impossible”: Matt Schroeder

Sheinbaum herself stressed in her morning conference on Thursday 9 January the importance of cooperation to curb trafficking at customs and borders.

“Just as they are concerned about the entry of drugs into the United States from Mexican territory, we are concerned about the entry of weapons. What we are very interested in is that (with Trump) the entry of weapons stops,” she said.

Mexican drug cartels hire individuals in the United States to ship parts to Mexico, where they assemble the weapons, and people who receive payment in cash or remittances on both sides of the border.

In the Texas case, which broke out in December 2023, the accused sent parts and manuals, and assessed on how to assemble 4,300 rifles in exchange for payment of US$3.5 million.

It is a modality that belongs to the so-called “ghost guns”, which can be manufactured with 3D printers or assembled with parts without serial numbers, making them untraceable.

Eugenio Weigend, an academic at the public University of Michigan, with its campus in Ann-Arbour, Michigan, noted that the manufacture of so-called “miscellaneous weapons”, such as components, is on the rise.

“They are a problem. Traffickers find many ways, it’s a new channel they use, it’s one of several options. It adds another layer to the arms trade and exacerbates the problem” of drug trafficking and violence, he told IPS from Austin, capital of the border state of Texas.

The Gun Control Act of 1968 does not regulate the fragment industry, so minors and people who would not pass a legal background check in the United States can buy them.

In recent years, the production of these components has increased exponentially in the northern nation, with lethal consequences for Mexico.

As the November report Under the Gun: Firearms Trafficking in Latin America and the Caribbean, produced by the non-governmental Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), explains, transnational criminal organisations frequently change their methods and ways of obtaining weapons, persistently seeking the least guarded route.

Fragments are components, such as frames and receivers. However, specific figures for seizures of arms parts alone are not always published in a disaggregated manner, as statistics tend to group together both whole weapons and their components.

US and Mexican government delegations met in October in Mexico City to discuss security issues. Despite bilateral efforts to control the trafficking of whole or parts of arms to Mexico, this flow continues to flourish, fuelling violence in the country. Credit: SRE

Lethal mix

While Mexico provides drugs for the United States trafficking and consumption market, its northern neighbour supplies weapons to criminal gangs, in a vicious cycle that causes its share of death in both territories.

Between 2016 and 2023, seizures of shipments to Mexico more than tripled, according to the non-governmental Small Arms Survey (SAS), based in the Swiss city of Geneva.

In parallel, figures from the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)  indicate that half of the weapons seized in Mexico were manufactured in the United States, while almost one-fifth came from other countries.

In more than one-sixth of the cases, non-United States companies produced them, while the ATF was unable to establish their origin in a similar percentage.

ATF was able to trace half of the product to retail buyers, but failed to link almost 50% to a specific buyer. Half were handguns and one third were rifles.

The statistics show an obvious underreporting, as the ATF only receives weapons that a federal agency, such as the attorney general’s office or the Army, captures in Mexico and forwards to it. But captures by state agencies are excluded.

Texas and Arizona were the main sources, due to their gun shops and fairs, and this Latin American country was the main market. There are more than 3,000 arms manufacturers operating in the United States, including several producers of parts kits.

Since 2005, the trend in the manufacture of miscellaneous weapons, which are essentially frames and receivers, has been on the rise, totalling 2.7 million in 2022. But between then and 2023, production fell by 36%, according to the United States Department of Justice, based on its partial figures.

Guns boost the capacity of criminal groups vying for access to the juicy United States criminal market, which also has an impact on violence levels in Mexico.

This has a direct impact on violence in this country of 130 million people, where more than 30,000 homicides occur annually, most of them committed with firearms, and more than 100,000 people go missing.

“Most trafficked weapons are obtained by dozens or hundreds of proxy buyers who conduct multiple transactions of low quantities of weapons, which are then trafficked across the border in large quantities of small shipments, usually in private cars. Detection and interdiction of these shipments is impossible,” SAS researcher Matt Schroeder told IPS from his Washington headquarters.

Estimates indicate that between 200,000 and 873,000 firearms are trafficked across the United States border into Mexico each year, with between 13.5 million and 15.5 million unregistered firearms circulating in Mexico.

The trafficking of US weapons, especially high-powered rifles, has fuelled violence in Mexico throughout this century, and US and Mexican authorities have failed to curb it. Infographic: Wilson Center

Inefficient

Measures implemented by both governments have not been sufficient to stem the flow of arms and their fragments.

The two nations formed the High-Level Security Dialogue in 2021, with five groups, including one on cross-border crimes. They are also part of the Bicentennial Framework, a binational security initiative that replaced the Merida Initiative that the United States funded between 2008 and 2021.

The United States has provided Mexico with US$3 billion in assistance since 2008 to address crime and violence and strengthen the rule of law, without the desired results.

This could be explained by facts such as those detected by the United States Government Accountability Office (GAO), which found no specific activities to achieve the set goals, nor performance indicators and evaluation plans.

In 2021, the GAO recommended improved weapons tracing, investigations of criminal organisations and greater collaboration with Mexican authorities.

That year, Mexico sued eight companies, including six United States-based producers, for US$10 billion in damages for negligent marketing and illicit trafficking of weapons in a case before the United States Supreme Court.

And on the other side, the administration of outgoing President Joe Biden, in office since January 2020 and set to hand over to ultraconservative tycoon Donald Trump on 20 January, stepped up federal controls on the purchase and distribution of guns.

Because of the loophole, the ATF issued a provision in 2022 reclassifying parts kits to have serial codes. The United States Supreme Court is considering a lawsuit brought by the producers of these kits against the measure.

The academic Weigend envisioned a complicated panorama, especially with Trump’s return to the White House.

In Mexico “this issue will continue to be a priority and a problem on the border, but in the United States I am not so optimistic that a regulation will pass at the federal level,” he said.

“Perhaps the Mexican administration will raise its voice more than the United States, it can generate more information about the impact of guns in the country, do more research, highlight the fact that the Hispanic population (in the United States) suffers more gun violence than other groups,” he said.

In fact, during his first term in office (2017-2021), Trump had a mixed performance on gun control, as his administration strengthened background checks for gun buyers and increased prosecution for gun crimes.

But it did not establish stricter laws, production and sales increased in 2020, among other causes due to the covid-19 pandemic, and the fight against cross-border trafficking made little or no progress.

For researcher Schroeder, binational trafficking requires resources to shore up several areas.

“A significant reduction in this trafficking requires, at the very least, a significant increase in resources for inspection at ports of entry and exit, for investigation of trafficking schemes, and greater coverage and education of potential sources of weapons in the United States,” he said.

Bilateral cooperation is on hold on the eve of Trump’s inauguration, who has criticised Mexico for its role in drug trafficking, to which the Mexican government has responded by asking it to help stem the flow of weapons.

A latent threat is the disappearance of the ATF, which would complicate the investigation and tracing of weapons. Republican senators Lauren Boebert, an explicit gun enthusiast, and Eric Burlinson introduced an initiative to that effect on Tuesday 7 January.