From Reporting Assistance to Sustained ATT Reporting: What Public Evidence Can Establish

Assistance for Arms Trade Treaty reporting is documented when a project ends, but its purpose,regular annual reporting, can only be observed years later. Counting reports after assistance can rewarda backlog-clearing exercise as if it were an established annual routine; counting only timely reports canmiss real gains in historical coverage. This paper proposes a reporting follow-up protocol that linkseach documented assistance episode to dated reporting observations and records seven outcomedimensions separately: submission, timeliness, public availability, content coverage, reporting-yearcoverage, submission continuity and contribution. It builds on existing ATT Voluntary Trust Fund(VTF) evaluation provisions and published reporting metrics. Two cases show why the distinctionsmatter. In Zambia, assistance in 2019-2020 was followed by retrospective reports covering 2018-2021,but no reports are recorded for 2022-2025. In Togo, a VTF-funded workshop in May 2024 wasfollowed by the country's first annual report, for 2025, dated 10 June 2026; whether annual reportingcontinues cannot yet be observed. The protocol relies on public records only and makes the evidentiarybasis of each conclusion inspectable.