Campaign Against Arms Trade’s new report exposes how the UK arms exports system is fundamentally broken and rigged in favour of pre-determined conclusions. The report focuses on two cases – the Saudi-led bombing of Yemen from 2015-2022, and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. Both cases highlight how successive governments have taken extraordinary measures to circumvent both their obligations under domestic arms export licensing criteria and international law, despite legal challenges and overwhelming evidence of the clear risk that British-made military equipment is being used to commit war crimes that have killed thousands of civilians.
Drawing on information revealed from the two judicial reviews brought by CAAT against the government’s arms sales to Saudi Arabia during the war in Yemen, and another brought by Palestinian human rights organisation Al-Haq against UK arms sales to Israel during the Gaza genocide, the report exposes how successive governments have systematically manipulated its arms export licence decision processes to ensure that arms sales could continue, in spite of overwhelming evidence that they were contributing to war crimes or even, in the case of Israel in Gaza, genocide. They have repeatedly adapted their reasoning and methodology in the face of new evidence and legal setbacks, and have deployed a form of ‘strategic ignorance’ to avoid coming to conclusions about Saudi and Israeli violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL – the “laws of war”), that might force them to halt arms sales. When all else failed, they abandoned altogether the Strategic Export Licensing Criteria (SELC) that are supposed to govern licensing decisions, to allow the supply of crucial components for Israel’s F-35 combat aircraft, used intensively to bomb Gaza, even when they finally acknowledged that there was a ‘clear risk’ that UK arms could be used in serious violations of IHL.
In doing so, the government has severely undermined the role of International Humanitarian Law, which is supposed to be a minimum standard for the protection of civilians in conflict, but which has now been rendered a “dead letter”. Moreover, they have effectively nullified the UK’s obligations under the Genocide Convention to do everything in its power to prevent genocide. Shamefully, the court allowed this abdication of responsibility, ruling that the question of whether the government was abiding by this and other international treaties was beyond the courts’ remit.
While the report does outline recommendations for government, it recognises that they seem superfluous in the face of successive governments wilful blindness and indifference to the impact of their arms sales and international law. Ultimately it concludes that only a radical uprooting of the systems of power and interest that underlie it can bring about real change.
About the authors
Katie Fallon is Advocacy Manager at CAAT, currently on sabbatical.
Sam Perlo-Freeman is Research Coordinator at CAAT,
