UK continues its slide into disgrace with arms sales to Rights Abusers

UK approves £12bn of arms exports to countries with poor human rights
Richard Norton-Taylor – The Guardian- 16 July, 2013

Israeli soldiers stand on the tanks stationed at an army deployment area
Nearly 400 arms export licences for ‘Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories’, for equipment valued at nearly £8bn, have been approved Photograph: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images

More than 3,000 current export licences for arms and military equipment worth more than £12bn have been approved for 27 countries classified by the Foreign Office as “of concern” because of their poor human rights record, a cross-party group of MPs reveals on Wednesday.

Countries for which significant sales have been approved include Israel – the destination of the bulk of the arms sales – Saudi Arabia, China, and Zimbabwe, according to the arms export controls committee’s annual report, drawn up by MPs from four separate select committees.

The chairman of the committee, the former Conservative defence minister Sir John Stanley, said: “The scale of the extant strategic licences to the FCO’s 27 countries of human rights concern puts into stark relief the inherent conflict between the government’s arms exports and human rights policies.”

He added: “The government should apply significantly more cautious judgments when considering arms export licence applications for goods to authoritarian regimes‚ which might be used to facilitate internal repression‚ in contravention of the government’s stated policy.”

The approval of nearly 400 arms export licences for “Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, for equipment valued at nearly £8bn, includes components for body armour, parts for “all-wheel drive vehicles with ballistic protection”, assault rifles, pistols, military support vehicles, and small arms ammunition.

However, most of the exports in terms of value consisted of cryptographic equipment, used for decoding and encoding communications, the Guardian understands.

More than 400 current export licences to Saudi Arabia include vehicles, components for military communications equipment, crowd-control ammunition, handgrenades, smoke/pyrotechnic ammunition and teargas/irritant ammunition.

For the first time, the arms export controls committee’s report gives details for all 27 countries identified by the Foreign Office as being “of human rights concern”, the number of existing export licences and the nature of the arms and arms-related goods approved.

In the past, details of the licenses were published by different departments around Whitehall and not collected together.

The total value of the exports is not known because some of them are approved with open-ended licences. …more