Arms Export Controls

Debate between Baroness Burt of Solihull and John Stanley

Thursday 20th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[Sir John Stanley (Tonbridge and Malling) (Con)]

I am glad to open what I hope and expect to be the first of our annual debates on the reports of the Committees on Arms Export Controls. First, I thank the members of the four Committees for their contributions to our report, which sets a high standard of detail, incisiveness and relevance to current events, with particular reference to north Africa and the middle east. I also thank the staff of our Committees for their invaluable contribution in bringing together our report, and I thank Ministers and their officials for the substantial volume of detailed information that they have provided to the Committees in the response to our report and in answer to our subsequent extensive questions. One of my objectives, which is shared by the members of the Committees, is to achieve a higher level of transparency in our work in the key area of arms export controls, and I believe that we have made a good start in that direction.

I start with various aspects of the arms export controls system. Much of the debate will focus on the situation in north Africa and the middle east, which I will come on to, but it is important to cover this central area of the controls system, and I begin with the Export Control Organisation. I see the attraction for the Government and, most particularly, for the Treasury of changing the system of funding for the ECO. The Government are considering a proposal whereby that funding is taken out of public expenditure and therefore from the general body of taxpayers and is made the responsibility of the arms exporting industry. There are, however, possible risks and dangers in going down that route, because a crucial feature of the ECO is its clear independence. We have no doubt whatever about the integrity of all the civil servants who work in the ECO, but the Government must answer the question of whether a change to the basis of its funding might change public perception from seeing the ECO as an independent watchdog to seeing it instead as a poodle of the arms exporting companies. That would be detrimental to the perception of our UK arms export controls. I hope that the Minister of State, Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, my hon. Friend the Member for Hertford and Stortford (Mr Prisk), and his colleagues will consider that point carefully.

We made recommendations about three particular issues: brass-plate companies, the pre-licence registration of arms brokers and extraterritorial arms export controls. I must express my acute disappointment that, six months after we published our report and its recommendations, we have still not received a substantive response from the Government on any of those three important policy areas. I put it to the Minister that we expect a substantive response on those three areas shortly, and certainly in good time before the Committees resume taking oral evidence in a few weeks.

On what are called military end-use controls, a key issue in how to deal with dual-use goods, I very much welcome the Government acting on the Committees’ recommendation to produce specific proposals for strengthening such controls. I gather that the Government have now proposed a specific strengthening of article 4(2) of the relevant European Union regulation. I urge them to continue to press for the amendment of that article so that we can achieve greater strengthening of control over military end-use.

[Lorely Burt (Solihull) (LD)]

I am sorry to intervene so early in the right hon. Gentleman’s speech. On that point, does he agree that we could urge the Government to look at the work on the on-sale of arms to third countries, and that we could do a little more to ensure that the arms that we are selling to friendly or neutral countries do not end up in the wrong hands?

[Sir John Stanley]

I entirely agree with the hon. Lady’s point. That is one of the central areas on which we constantly keep watch. It is of prime importance that when an export licence is granted to a particular country for a particular piece of military equipment or particular goods, we as the exporting country know that that is where the items concerned will finish up. I am grateful to her for making that point.

I come now to sodium thiopental and torture end-use controls. An extremely creditable bit of investigative journalism revealed to us in the autumn of last year that a small company, in Acton I think, was exporting sodium thiopental to certain states in the United States that still use capital punishment and that the substance was among the chemicals used in the execution of prisoners. In other words, items coming out of this country were being used for capital punishment purposes in the United States. Our Committees were deeply concerned and the Government did react. We have debated with the Government whether they reacted quickly enough, but they did impose export controls on that particular item. We have now asked for those controls to be carried out more widely. I very much welcome that the Minister himself wrote to the EU High Representative Baroness Ashton and urged that the controls we brought in as the UK’s national controls over the export of sodium thiopental should be applied EU-wide by means of an amendment to the EU torture goods regulation. I hope that the Government will continue to press for that important amendment to be made, so that we have EU-wide controls and ensure that, EU-wide, we are not making a chemical contribution to capital punishment executions in the US.

On the proposed international arms trade treaty, I am glad to tell the House that, since our report was published, the Committees have had a useful informal meeting with our former ambassador to the conference on disarmament in Geneva, John Duncan. I would like to put on the record that Ambassador Duncan performed outstandingly in his contribution to the preparatory committee phase of that key negotiation, and made a signal contribution to the current situation. We now have before us at least three quarters of a draft treaty, in a text, in advance of the crucial negotiating phase, which will take place next year. The Government in their response said:

“The Government is committed to securing an effective, legally binding international Arms Trade Treaty. The UK continues to play a leading role in the UN process on the Arms Trade Treaty to this end.”

I urge the Government to ensure that the UK continues to be a major driving force in hopefully bringing the treaty to a conclusion in 2012.

Finally on the arms export controls system, I come to bribery and corruption, and I want to make two points. First, our Committees recommended that an anti-corruption provision should be included in the arms trade treaty, and I trust that the Minister will assure us that the British Government will do all they can to ensure that that happens. Secondly, the Committees were somewhat concerned that the Government were taking too narrow a view in dealing with bribery and corruption with regard to arms exports. In our subsequent series of questions to the Government, we asked:

“Will the Government confirm that if it becomes aware of corruption in arms deals it will, regardless of whether there is a risk of diversion or re-export under Criteria 7, take appropriate action under the provisions of the Bribery Act 2010?”

I am glad that in their latest response to us the Government have answered with an unequivocal “Yes”, and that is very welcome indeed.

I come now to the Government’s arms export policy in the light of the Arab spring, particularly in relation to arms that could be used for internal repression contrary to criterion 2 of the consolidated criteria and for provoking armed conflict contrary to criterion 3. I want to start by putting what I believe are the absolutely essential facts on the record since the Government announced their review of arms export licensing in the light of what has happened with the arrival of the Arab spring.

I am mystified why the Foreign Secretary and the Foreign Office keep saying that the first announcement of the review was made by the Foreign Secretary on 16 March in answer to a question from the hon. Member for Basildon and Billericay (Mr Baron) at a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee. It is clear from the documentation that the first announcement was made by the Under-Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, the hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), in his press release on 18 February. It was a highly significant press release, to which I shall return.

In the wake of the announcement of that review, there has been a revocation of existing UK licences for arms exports on a scale and over a geographical area totally unprecedented since the Committees were first formed more than 10 years ago. I cannot over-emphasise the extent to which that is the most enormous jump from anything that has previously happened. From the documents that we have received from the Government, I believe that a total of 158 extant arms export licences to countries in north Africa and the middle east have been revoked as a result of internal repression or the risk of it as a consequence of the Arab spring. Those arms export licences have been revoked in no fewer than eight countries: Abu Dhabi, Bahrain, Egypt, Kuwait, Libya, Qatar, Syria and Tunisia. When I say that the scale of the revocations is unprecedented, I contrast them with, for example, the revocations made by the previous Labour Government following the Israeli armed hostilities in Gaza. The number of revocations then, mainly in relation to components given by British exporters to the Israeli navy, were a handful, so this order of magnitude is unprecedented.

In our questions to the Government, we asked for a list of all the licences that have been revoked. It makes extremely interesting reading. They are all there in the Government’s response—25 pages listing the revocations. It is extraordinarily helpful to the House and to the wider public that we now have that information. It lists in each case the end-user country and the details of the equipment sold. But there is one common denominator behind each and every revocation, and it is given in the “reasons” column. In every case, the reason for revocation was the Government’s conclusion that the licence now contravenes criteria 2 and 3 of the consolidated criteria. I remind the House that criterion 2 states that no licence will be granted for

“equipment which might be used for internal repression”.

Criterion 3 states that no licences will be granted for equipment

“which would provoke…prolong…or aggravate”

armed conflicts.

I and, I am sure, the whole House welcome the revocations absolutely, and we welcome the scale of the revocations, but the key point, which the Government seem to be reluctant to acknowledge, is that the scale of the revocations is the clearest possible evidence of the scale of the misjudgment that took place when the export licences were originally granted. The Government must address that—the scale of the misjudgment. The reality is that under the previous Government—we took our analysis back to January 2009—and under the present Government that misjudgment continued up to the dawn of the Arab spring, as journalists who managed to get into the ransacked British embassy in Tripoli found. They found papers there indicating that right up to the start of the Arab spring, we were engaged in major military support and military activities vis-à-vis the Gaddafi Government.

With that sort of background, one might have expected the Government in their response to be somewhat contrite, even apologetic, but sadly that has not been so. When I came face to face with the Foreign Secretary in the Foreign Affairs Committee on 7 September, I found his initial written statement giving the Government’s interim view of their review—the 18 July statement—profoundly misleading, and I will explain why. It contained the following sentence:

“The review concluded that there was no evidence of any misuse of controlled military goods exported from the United Kingdom.”—[Official Report, 18 July 2011; Vol. 531, c. 79WS.]

Of course there was no evidence. One has only to look through the 25 pages of items that we exported to see that their nature was overwhelmingly such that their origin could not be identified when they reached the specified countries. They were made up of electronics, communications equipment, cryptography, ammunition and sniper rifles. There are no Union Jacks on bullets and sniper rifles. The Foreign Secretary said that there was no evidence, but of course there was no evidence, and we did not have anyone on the ground anyway.

The Foreign Secretary continued:

“Consultations with our overseas posts revealed no evidence that any of the offensive naval, air or land-based military platforms used by Governments in north Africa or the middle east against their own populations during the Arab spring, were supplied from the United Kingdom.”—[Official Report, 18 July 2011; Vol. 531, c. 79WS.]

I tabled a question to find out what offensive naval, air or land-based military platforms we had supplied to countries that were the main focus of internal repression in north Africa and the middle east during the Arab spring. Last week, the Minister replied: to Bahrain, none; to Egypt, none; to Syria, none; to Tunisia, none; to Yemen, none. At that point, he must have breathed a sigh of relief in thinking that he was about to break the Government’s duck, and he said that we may have sold up to 12 armoured personnel carriers to Libya. He was, however, obliged to add:

“We cannot verify whether these items were actually exported.”—[Official Report, 12 October 2011; Vol. 533, c. 443W.]

Therefore, the Foreign Secretary’s statement suggesting that all is well and that none of the offensive military platforms exported from Britain have been used in the countries under discussion is based on a complete chimera. I have great respect and admiration for the Foreign Secretary, but if his officials, who no doubt drafted that statement, think that they can pull the wool over the eyes of the Committees on Arms Export Controls and of the House, they are making a serious mistake that I hope will not be repeated.

The Foreign Secretary’s most recent statement on 13 October was a distinct improvement, but I still need to be persuaded that the Government have addressed the root of the problem that has been illustrated by the Arab spring and the revocations that we have been obliged to make. The Foreign Secretary stated:

“The review concluded that there are no fundamental flaws with the UK export licensing system.”

It may—or may not—be true that there are no flaws in the system, but I am not persuaded that the Government are addressing the key point about flawed judgments within the system. The inescapable fact is that judgments have been shown to be wildly over-optimistic and rose-tinted regarding the sale to authoritarian regimes of weapons that could be used for internal repression.

The Foreign Secretary continued:

“The Government propose to introduce a mechanism to allow immediate licensing suspension to countries experiencing a sharp deterioration in security or stability,”

but that does not address the central problem, because suspension becomes relevant only after export licensed goods have moved out of the UK. Suspension means that a licence has already been granted and that the goods have left the UK and are out of the door—the bullets have bolted and are in the hands of an authoritarian regime. Although a better system of suspension would provide a good safety net, it does not deal with the central issue of making a correct initial judgment about whether to grant an export licence.