UK FM Presses to Keep Selling Bombs to Saudi Arabia
Local Editor
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson privately pushed for Britain to keep selling bombs and other weapons to Saudi Arabia after the country's air forces martyred over 140 people attending a funeral in Yemen.
Correspondence between Johnson and Liam Fox, the International Trade Secretary, shows Johnson intervened after the bombing to tell his Cabinet colleague that he did not judge the attack as a reason to stop selling weapons.
The funeral bombing in Sana'a, the Yemeni capital, hit the city's Great Hall at the start of October last year. Minutes after the first air strike a second bomb hit, killing more people including those who had rushed to help.
"This is an extremely complex situation and I have recently received a further IHL update," he wrote in a letter dated 8 November 2016.
"Based on the analysis and evidence in the update and noting the commitments to Saudi authorities have given us, particularly in response to the 8 October airstrike on the Sana'a Great Hall, I assess that the ‘clear risk' threshold for refusal under Criterion 2[c] has not yet been reached," Johnson said.
"The issue is extremely finely balanced, but I judge at present that the Saudis appear committed both to improving processes and to taking action to address failures/individual incidents."
The correspondence was revealed to the High Court in London as part of a legal challenge by Campaign Against Arms Trade [CAAT] against the continued sale of weapons to Saudi Arabia.
The revelation came days after the court heard that the Government's top civil servant in charge of weapons export controls recommended that exports be stopped.
More than £3.3bn worth of arms has been licensed to Saudi Arabia since the bombing began in March 2015. Arms companies ramped up sales of bombs and other explosives by 100 times what they were before the conflict began in comparable three-month periods at the start of 2016.
Human rights groups said more than 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen as the Saudi Arabian-led coalition intervenes in the country's war.
Schools, hospitals and food factories have been hit while the United Nations declared the situation a humanitarian catastrophe.
CAAT says the Government is unlawfully failing to suspend the sale of UK arms to Saudi Arabia, despite evidence that the Gulf state is guilty of "repeated and serious breaches" of international humanitarian law.
The Government claimed there is no "clear risk" that UK-licensed items might be used to commit a serious violation of humanitarian law. Licensing is the responsibility of Liam Fox's Department for International Trade; it was previously the responsibility of the Department for Business, Innovation, and Skills, which has now been abolished.
Source: The Independent, Edited by website team
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