Wassenaar Arrangement

The Wassenaar Arrangement (full name: The Wassenaar Arrangement on Export Controls for Conventional Arms and Dual-Use Goods and Technologies) is a multilateral export control regime (MECR) with 41 participating states including many former COMECON (Warsaw Pact) countries.

It is the successor to the Cold war-era Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM), and was established on July 12, 1996, in the Dutch town of Wassenaar, near The Hague. The Wassenaar Arrangement is considerably less strict than COCOM, focusing primarily on the transparency of national export control regimes and not granting veto power to individual members over organizational decisions. A Secretariat for administering the agreement is located in Vienna, Austria. Like COCOM, however, it is not a treaty, and therefore has no legally binding aspect to it.

Every six months member countries exchange information on deliveries of conventional arms to non Wassenaar members that fall under eight broad weapons categories: battle tanks, armored combat vehicles (ACVs), large-caliber artillery, military aircraft/unmanned aerial vehicles, military and attack helicopters, warships, missiles or missile systems, and small arms and light weapons.