Championed by nine donor governments, PSAAG successfully bid for a two-year grant from the United Nations Trust Facility Supporting Cooperation on Arms Regulation (UNSCAR) in New York. Our project promises to advance universalisation of the Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) and to promote implementation of the UN small arms Programme of Action (UNPoA) and its International Small Arms Control Standards (ISACS) across all nations of the south west Pacific. PSAAG also appointed Arms Control Manager Laura Spano to guide this two year UNSCAR-funded programme. For those who follow Pacific arms control, PSAAG launched the Twitter feed @PSAAGOrg.

In other internal moves, the PSAAG Secretariat migrated from Oxfam Australia to the Centre for Armed Violence Reduction, assisted by Act for Peace. Recruitment and planning began to host four regional workshops for officials, academics and civil society stakeholders across the Pacific.

At United Nations Headquarters in New York, PSAAG Arms Control Manager Laura Spano attended the second Meeting of Governmental Experts (MGE2) of the UN small arms process (UNPoA). Meanwhile, The Pacific’s ‘consensus for disarmament’ gains international attention when Newsweek, The Conversation, the World Economic Forum and others republish ‘The Pacific Region Lives Up To its Name with Disarming Success’, an article by PSAAG member Philip Alpers.