Local Editor
Britain is breaking international law by selling weapons to Saudi Arabia and should suspend some export licences immediately, a cross-party House of Lords committee has said. The warning is the latest sign that UK political opinion has hardened against Saudi Arabia since the killing of Jamal Khashoggi last year.
The Lords international relations committee said that British weapons were “highly likely to be the cause of significant civilian casualties” in Yemen, where Saudi-backed forces are fighting Houthi revolutionaries.
The opposition Labour party has long called for all UK arms sales to Riyadh to be suspended because of the conflict in Yemen. However, Theresa May’s Conservative government has argued that it is “on the right side” of international humanitarian law, because of the Saudi-led coalition’s processes for investigating possible errors.
In a report published on Saturday, the Lords international relations committee disagreed — saying the government is “narrowly on the wrong side” of the law. David Howell, the committee’s Conservative chair, said its conclusion on the likelihood of civilian casualties was based on “the volume and type of arms” being sold by the UK to Saudi Arabia.
The report is an embarrassment to Jeremy Hunt, the UK foreign secretary, who has sought to energize the Yemen peace process since taking office last July. Mr Hunt said on Thursday that the process had reached “a crunch moment” over the port of Hodeida.
The warring Yemeni parties agreed to redeploy their troops around the port, which is controlled by the Houthis, at talks in Stockholm in December but there has been little progress on the ground. The port is the main artery for the import of aid and goods into Yemen.
“I think there is a degree of optimism that things may finally start to move but also a lot of concern that things still haven’t been completed,” he added. His comments followed a meeting of the so-called Yemen Quad — the foreign ministers of the UK, the US, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — in Warsaw.
The Lords committee said the government “should be more willing” to use its role as penholder on Yemen at the UN Security Council, “if peace talks are not progressing”. The UK has been a big donor of aid Yemen but the committee said that in addition the government must tackle the “root cause of this suffering: the hostilities themselves”.
The UK has licensed nearly £5bn in weapons to Saudi Arabia since the bombing of Yemen began in 2015, according to government figures analysed by the Campaign against the Arms Trade (CAAT), an advocacy group. The sales included aircraft, drones, grenades, bombs and missiles.
CAAT has mounted a legal challenge to stop UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia. The Lords committee said: “We are deeply concerned that the Saudi-led coalition’s misuse of their weaponry is causing — whether deliberately or accidentally — loss of civilian life. Relying on assurances by Saudi Arabia and Saudi-led review processes is not an adequate way of implementing the obligations for a risk-based assessment set out in the Arms Trade Treaty.”
Source: News Agencies, Edited by Website Team
