Arms Trade: Yemen

Gareth Thomas Excerpts

Tuesday 20th April 2021 Westminster Hall

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op) [V]]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Kim Johnson) on securing the debate. She is already known in the House for strong and challenging interventions, and her speech today will only add to that reputation.

My hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali), for Enfield North (Feryal Clark), for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel), for Liverpool, Wavertree (Paula Barker), for Birkenhead (Mick Whitley), for Brighton, Kemptown (Lloyd Russell-Moyle), for Cynon Valley (Beth Winter), for Stockport (Navendu Mishra), for Luton South (Rachel Hopkins), for Cardiff West (Kevin Brennan), and for Leicester East (Claudia Webbe) all underlined in their contributions the fact that the humanitarian situation in Yemen is desperate. A decade of fighting has produced the world’s worst humanitarian disaster, and over 230,000 people have already been killed by the war, and the resulting food shortages and disease. Millions of people are still at risk of starvation and disease.

If the situation in Yemen was not bad enough, covid and the failure thus far of ceasefire negotiations is quite clearly exacerbating the terrible crisis still further, particularly in the oil and gas region of Marib, where up to 2 million people are sheltering from the intensifying conflict. At this stage, I echo the call of my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff West that his 29-year-old constituent be released from prison and allowed to return home. I am sure the whole House supports his call for that to happen.

The failure in the beginning of March of the UN’s annual appeal for emergency funding to match last year’s pledges is deeply worrying. As Members have highlighted, the decisions of UK Ministers to impose an almost 50% cut in our aid to Yemen is striking. Many of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world are in Yemen, and our country has a strong and long history with the people of Yemen.

As the House knows, the Government’s failure to implement their own laws relating to arms exports led eventually to the Court of Appeal ordering, in July two years ago, the Department to stop granting licences for exports of arms to Saudi Arabia. The Court of Appeal’s decision was based on a long catalogue of attacks on the civilian population since 2015. Thousands were killed in air strikes. Weddings, funerals and markets were all targeted. One year after the Court’s judgement against the Department, the Secretary of State published a new internal assessment of the Saudi bombing campaign in Yemen. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, it was claimed that despite “isolated incidents” where international humanitarian law may have been broken, there was no pattern of activity that would lead her to question the intent or the capacity of the coalition to comply with international humanitarian law.

It is striking that, despite our requests, the Secretary of State has still not published any of the analysis that she undertook on the Saudi bombing campaign. She has repeatedly refused to publish a list of allegations that her new analysis examined. She has also refused to disclose which incidents she classed as possible violations of international law. I urge the Minister to publish that evidence, even at this late stage.

Arms sales resumed very quickly, reaching their highest total compared with any of the previous 19 quarters put together, before the Court of Appeal’s decision. As other hon. Members have made clear, a series of countries—not least the United States—have taken the decision to suspend arms sales. It continues to be surprising that the UK has not followed suit. I look forward to hearing the Minister attempt to justify that decision.