133 Article 55 (c) of the UN Charter, available at http://www.un.org/en/documents/charter/chapter9.shtml. 134 Article 56 of the UN Charter. 135 Article 16 of the International Law Commission’s Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, (Articles on State Responsibility), commended by the General Assembly, A/RES/56/83, 12 December 2001. The customary law status of the Articles on State Responsibility was affirmed by the International Court of Justice in its Genocide Case Judgment (Bosnia v. Serbia), 26 February 2007 136 The ICRC, which is assigned a special visiting and monitoring role in international humanitarian law treaties has defined serious violations of international humanitarian law as: (i) grave breaches as specified under the four 1949 Geneva Conventions (Articles 50, 51, 130, and 147 of Conventions I, II, III, and IV, respectively); (ii) serious violations of Common Article 3 to the 1949 Geneva Conventions; (iii) grave breaches as specified under Additional Protocol I of 1977 (Articles 11 and 85); (iv) war crimes as specified under Article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court; and (v) other war crimes in international and non-international armed conflicts under customary law. See ‘Statement of the ICRC to the United Nations Diplomatic Conference on the Arms Trade Treaty’, New York, 12 July 2012. See also ‘What are “serious violations of international humanitarian law”?; Explanatory Note’; available at www.icrc.org/eng/assets/ files/2012/att-what-are-serious-violations-of-ihl-icrc.pdf 137 International Law Commission, ‘Draft articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, with Commentaries’ in ‘Report of the International Law Commission on the Work of its 53rd session’ (2001) UN Doc A/56/10, Commentary to Article 40, para. 5. The concept of peremptory norms of general international law is recognized in international practice, in the jurisprudence of international and national courts and tribunals and in legal doctrine. Peremptory norms of international law — norms of jus cogens — have been defined by Article 53 of the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties as norms ‘accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character’. 138 The ILC Articles on State Responsibility indicate that a State can be held responsible for the legal consequences of its conduct when the impact is ‘neither foreseen nor of an easily foreseeable kind’, see ‘ILC Articles on State Responsibility’, commentary to Article 23, para. 2. Articles 16 and 41(2). The Articles were commended by the General Assembly and annexed to resolution 56/83, Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts, UN Doc. A/RES/56/83, 12 December 2001. 139 For example, the US Foreign Assistance Act contains specific restrictions on the export of defence articles to governments that support terrorism, violate internationally recognized human rights norms, or interfere with humanitarian operations – see U.S. Code 22 (1961), §2304 and U.S. Code 22 (1976) §2778 for the Arms Export Control Act which provides that “no defense articles or defense services designated by the President under subsection (a)(1) of this section may be exported or imported without a license for such export or import, issued in accordance with this chapter and regulations issued under this chapter”. The member states of the European Union are required to implement the EU Common Position 008/944/CFSP of 8 December 2008 defining common rules governing control of exports of military technology and equipment, and under Criterion Two an export licence must be denied by member states if there is “a clear risk” that the military technology or equipment to be exported “might be used for internal repression“ constituting serious violations of human rights or “might be used in the commission of serious violations of international humanitarian law.” Similar rules have been agreed by other regional and multilateral groupings of states, for example by states participating in the OSCE, the Wassenaar Arrangement, the OAS, ECOWAS, the States of the Great Lakes and the Horn of Africa, and SICA. 140 A total of 118 member states had signed the Arms Trade Treaty and 44 had ratified the treaty at the time of writing this report 0n 26 August 2014. The treaty will enter into force 90 days after the 50th ratification and this is expected by early 2015. For updated figures on the number of signatures and ratifications of the treaty, see www.un.org/disarmament/ATT/ . Many states already include some of the items mentioned in this report in their arms trade control lists – see www.wassenaar.org/controllists/ 141 Convention on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the Use of Certain Conventional Weapons which may be deemed to be Excessively Injurious or to have Indiscriminate Effects, http://disarmament.un.org/treaties/t/ccwc/text 142 See for instance UN General Assembly resolutions entitled “Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment,” resolutions 66/150, 19 December 2011, para. 24; 67/161, 20 December 2012, para. 25; 68/156, 18 December 2013, para. 30. 143 Council Regulation (EC) No 1236/2005 of 27th June 2005 concerning trade in certain goods which could be used for capital punishment, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, published in Official Journal of the European Union, L200/1, 30 July 2005, available at http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri =OJ:L:2005:200:0001:0019:EN:PDF 144 UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The Human Rights Council endorsed the Guiding Principles in its resolution 17/4 of 16 June 2011, Principle 11, available at www.ohchr.org/Documents/Publications/GuidingPrinciplesBusinessHR_EN.pdf 145 International Commission of Jurists, ‘Report of the ICJ Expert Legal Panel on Corporate Complicity in International Crimes’, Volume 1, Geneva, 2008, ISBN: 978 92-9037-131-5 40 China’s Trade in Tools of Torture and Repression Amnesty International – Index: ASA 17/042/2014