The European Commission proposed on Thursday 27 October a revision of EU rules on the import, export and transit of firearms for civilian use, as 35 million illegal firearms are believed to be in civilian hands in the EU and around 630,000 firearms are listed as stolen or lost in the Schengen Information System, announced European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson.
Weapons that often arrive in the EU from third countries - a phenomenon that could increase with the war in Ukraine - and fall into the hands of “organised crime groups”, the Commissioner said.
“We are going to regulate compliance issues for weapons much more”, she announced.
The proposal revises the current Regulation on the subject dating from 2012. The Commission proposes both to facilitate the legal trade in firearms for civilian use and to reduce the administrative burden on manufacturers, dealers and users of firearms in order to avoid the development of the black market while improving the safety dimension for Europeans.
The Regulation also aims to combat trafficking in firearms and to coordinate controls and risk assessments to improve their traceability, the Commission says.
The aim is to better control some legal weapons - such as alarm or signal weapons - that have been transformed into more dangerous weapons, the Commissioner explained. Strict technical standards for these weapons, which are devices manufactured to fire only blank, tear gas or irritant ammunition, should thus prevent them from being turned into lethal firearms.
Semi-finished firearm components will also be subject to stricter rules. They will only be imported by authorised dealers and brokers, which will reduce the threat of unmarked and unregistered home-made firearms, the Commission says.
An end-user certificate for the most dangerous firearms will also be required to ensure that the buyer is the final recipient of the goods and does not plan to transfer them to anyone else.
In addition, national authorities will have to check whether a person applying for an authorisation has already been refused an authorisation in another Member State and will have to share the information with the other Member States.
The new Regulation also proposes several paths to improvement, including economic improvements, to facilitate fair competition in the legal arms trade, so as to avoid the use of the black market. The proposal will, for example, exempt manufacturers, dealers and users of firearms from paying a fee to obtain an import or export licence.
Import and export procedures will also be simplified for hunters, marksmen and exhibitors, with no prior import or export authorisation required for hunters holding a European Firearms Pass.
The Regulation also creates a new EU electronic licensing system for firearms manufacturers and traders to apply for import and export authorisation. This licence will replace the various national systems, which are mainly paper-based.
A systematic collection of data on international movements of civilian firearms as well as data on seized firearms is also required. “The lack of centralised data at national level and the lack of transparency due to the sensitivity of the data hinders the collection of qualitative data and therefore hinders the development of targeted policies in the field of firearms trafficking”, explains the Commission.
The Regulation therefore provides for a system of receiving annual data from Member States on the number of authorisations and refusals of authorisations for firearms as well as on the quantities and values of imports and exports of civilian firearms, by origin.
Link to the proposal: https://aeur.eu/f/3ti (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)