Committees on Arms Export Controls
Oral evidence: The Arms Trade Treaty HC 428
Wednesday 29 June 2016
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 29 June 2016.
Members present: Chris White (Chair), Crispin Blunt, Ann Clwyd, Mr Nigel Evans, Amanda Milling, John Spellar
Witness: Ann Feltham, Parliamentary Co-ordinator, Campaign Against Arms Trade, gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Good morning and thank you for coming along. You may have noticed that this is quite a busy period in the parliamentary timetable so we appreciate your efforts even more. Could you briefly explain your organisation, its purpose and some of its history to the Committee?
Ann Feltham: Yes. I am the Parliamentary Co-ordinator at Campaign Against Arms Trade. CAAT is the acronym we use for it. It was set up in 1974 after the war in the Middle East the previous year, where UK arms were used on both sides. It was set up by a number of organisations including the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, the Quakers, the Peace Pledge Union, the United Nations Association and others, who all found themselves working on arms export issues in the aftermath of that war.
Subsequently, Campaign Against Arms Trade has become an organisation very much in its own right. We campaign, as it says, to end the arms trade. We focus on the UK, although we liaise with other organisations in Europe and beyond. We also work on issues of militarisation more generally and on alternatives to military industry employment. It is fair to say that we have campaigned very strongly in the past on various issues: on arms exports to repressive regimes throughout the world, including places such as Chile, Indonesia and Iran and Iraq when they were fighting each other. We have consistently campaigned on Saudi Arabia, because that has been the biggest customer for UK arms. We have also looked in particular at arms export promotion. The export promotion agency is currently the UK Trade & Investment Defence & Security Organisation, originally set up by Denis Healey in 1966 as the Defence Sales Organisation. That, in its various guises, has always been a big focus for us.
That is a kind of background. We are currently a company limited by guarantee. We are not a charity. About 75% of our funding comes from our supporters around the country.
Q2 Chair: Thank you. I have a supplementary question. You listed a number of campaigns and a number of organisations that you have partnered with, and you clearly have very wide reach as an organisation. Could you perhaps give me three examples of things you have actually achieved?
Ann Feltham: One thing we have actually achieved, I would say, is putting the whole issue on the map. Before we were set up, there was very little campaigning on the arms trade issue in the UK. We have consistently raised the issue throughout the decades we have been around, so I would think that is a very big one. During those years we have seen a lot of changes. One of the big ones is that there is now a lot more information publicly available than there used to be, so transparency is much greater. I would not say that is all down to us, but it is partly down to us.
We will come on to the arms trade treaty, which we have been sceptical about, but we have not been completely sceptical about international instruments. We were one of about six organisations in the United Kingdom that was leading the campaign for a landmine treaty. We were very heavily involved in that throughout the campaign until it was adopted. In fact, we were co-hosts of the first international meeting on the issue in London.
A third thing is this. As well as the greater transparency we have been pushing for, there is now huge public awareness about the arms trade. It goes hand in hand; there have been some universities, for instance, disinvesting from the arms trade. The National Gallery now no longer hosts receptions for the arms industry. The whole public awareness of and revulsion for the arms industry has been growing. As people probably know, if people go for ethical investments, arms and tobacco are always the first ones that are not acceptable. That is what I would say we have done over those years.
Q3 Amanda Milling: You have already touched on the arms trade treaty. How significant an international agreement is the arms trade treaty?
Ann Feltham: CAAT was always a bit sceptical about it as it was going on. For me, it was very different from the landmines treaty, which is an absolute ban on a weapon that, frankly, commerce was very little interested in. The big arms companies weren’t interested. The arms trade treaty was very different as an international instrument, because the arms companies got on board quite early in the negotiations and were saying that it would not make much difference to them. That was quite telling for us and quite different. In fact, we were worried at that point that it actually might have the result of legitimising the trade rather than adding controls to the trade. I do not think anything we have seen since has disabused us of that idea.
Q4 Amanda Milling: You mentioned right at the beginning that you were sceptical. Were those your primary reasons for being sceptical?
Ann Feltham: Our primary reason was that if a Government such as the UK, which was a prime mover in the arms trade treaty, could at the same time be promoting arms in the way they were—with the arms export agency, with prime ministerial visits to promote arms sales and with the royal family joining in to promote arms sales—any treaty to control them was going to be marginal at best and legitimising at worst. That led us to be sceptical all along.
The other thing we found while people were campaigning for it was that political parties of every persuasion were turning round and saying, “We are campaigning for an arms trade treaty,” or “We are promoting an arms trade treaty,” as if that was their job done on the arms trade for a decade. Any supporter of ours who wrote to an MP normally got, “This might be dreadful but we support an arms trade treaty,” as if that was going to solve it.
Q5 Amanda Milling: You mentioned the role that the UK Government played. Can you elaborate a bit more on the role that the UK Government had in establishing the arms trade treaty?
Ann Feltham: Some of my colleagues from other organisations are probably better placed to answer that than I am. For us, it was the contradiction the whole time between the export promotion role that the Government were playing and their advocacy for the arms trade treaty. There are two very big examples. One was in the summer of 2012 when there was a meeting at the UN to negotiate the treaty. Alistair Burt went along, a junior Foreign Office Minister at the time, to help negotiate the treaty. In exactly the same week, 15 Government Ministers, including the Prime Minister, were at the Farnborough air show. The Farnborough air show is not entirely military, but it is very largely military. One or two of those Ministers were from Transport and similar Departments. The kind of difference in emphasis between the level of Minister looking after the arms trade treaty and the level of Minister who was going along to sell arms at the Farnborough air show very much showed up the priorities. A second example is the consecutive tweets by the UK ambassador to Tripoli in Libya in 2013. One tweet welcomed the signing of the arms trade treaty. The second tweet, immediately following that, welcomed a UK naval ship to Tripoli to sell arms. It was a floating arms exhibition. That again told us that the treaty was really nothing to do with arms reduction.
Q6 Amanda Milling: You are clearly sceptical about the creation of the arms trade treaty and the involvement of the UK Government. Was there anything you welcomed in that?
Ann Feltham: Over years, particularly in the small arms field, it might, I hope, have some part to play in the cumulative effect of making it more unacceptable to export arms. Beyond that, there was not that much we welcomed, no. I think it just detracted. To date, although it is really difficult to measure because other things are going on in the world at the same time, there is certainly no measurable effect of the introduction of the arms trade treaty. In fact, the Saudi Arabia case shows the complete opposite.
Q7 Amanda Milling: I think you know my questions before I even get to them because you have pre-empted a few. I was going to ask you what effect the arms trade treaty has had on global sales of arms and the proliferation of them.
Ann Feltham: It is very soon, so in many ways it is not yet measurable, but the indications are definitely not great. Although I am a sceptic, I was always slightly hopeful that I might be proved wrong, although I assumed I would not be; but certainly to date it is not great. We always thought that Russia would continue arming Assad, and it obviously has and has actually sent planes over there. We always thought that the UK Government would certainly continue arming Saudi. What I had not expected was that the situation would be as appalling as it is now, with Saudi Arabia leading the coalition bombing Yemen, and the UK Government still not bringing in an arms embargo against Saudi Arabia.
Chair: We will come on to that.
Ann Feltham: I think that just shows that the arms trade treaty is not working.
Q8 Crispin Blunt: While obviously the name of your organisation explains that you are abolitionists as far as the arms trade is concerned, presumably you understand what the first duty of a Government is.
Ann Feltham: Yes: to defend the security of its citizens.
Q9 Crispin Blunt: In today’s world, how are the Government supposed to do that? How big do you think the British defence budget ought to be?
Ann Feltham: We do not as an organisation have a position on that as such. Although we are anti-militarists, we do not have a very developed policy on UK procurement per se. I think, however, that as an organisation we can say very strongly that the military and security are not synonymous. Most of the threats facing the UK today are not military or not the kind of thing that needs an aircraft carrier.
Q10 Crispin Blunt: But do you believe that the United Kingdom should have armed forces at all?
Ann Feltham: Some of our members do, or rather some of our supporters—we do not have members per se—and some do not. That is not an area that we go into in great detail. When we explore the alternatives to military employment, we look at halving UK procurement and stopping arms exports. We see the two in a slightly different light, because we know that our supporters have different opinions on military defence.
Q11 Crispin Blunt: As far as the arms trade treaty is concerned, accepting that it sounds as though the base position of some of your members is no defence expenditure whatsoever—consistent, for example, with the Quaker tradition—and that your object is abolition of the arms trade, would you accept that it is a completely unreasonable expectation that you will achieve that objective while we have conventional defence in the kind of shape it is in? It is not consistent with the efficient maintenance of defence by the United Kingdom, for example. You cannot expect in that sense to achieve your objective while matters continue to be arranged in the way that they are. Presumably you welcome the arms trade treaty as a step forward in the regulation of the industry.
Ann Feltham: I do not think it is really regulating the industry. I would also question your—
Crispin Blunt: It is regulating the trade.
Ann Feltham: I would question your assumption that arms exports actually help the UK in procuring weaponry. In fact, the new strategic defence and security review puts exportability at the front, before equipment for the UK’s own armed forces. When they are considering new equipment they have to look at exportability first. The two may not be compatible. Some years ago the RAF had to buy a jet they did not particularly want because they were trying to persuade the Indian Air Force to buy it, and it would not do so if the UK had not bought it itself. I do not think you can necessarily say that you have to have arms exports even if you do want some military defence for the UK.
Again, I would query it. In the world today, even some military personnel, as I am sure some of you know, do not think the equipment being bought actually addresses the threats the world faces now, such as cyber or terrorism. The equipment is much more of a prestige effort by the UK Government.
Q12 Crispin Blunt: Any nation seeking to acquire a defence capability, as all nations do, to whatever extent, depending on their security situation, is going to want to acquire a suite of capabilities, including I imagine what you call “prestige” equipment. All the parts of the defence capability spectrum support jobs at the high end of the science and industry capability. They support really good jobs in the United Kingdom economy, because we are actually rather good at making this stuff, and our share of the world defence market is significantly ahead of our own global share of GDP, for example. This is a very important export industry for us in its own terms. Presumably, as long as there is an arms trade, which it is reasonable for you to accept is not going to disappear, it is going to be regulated within the arms trade treaty, and I hope I can encourage you to accept that it is a better place to be if it is being regulated and bringing more transparency to the trade. At the same time, you would understand that it is an important United Kingdom objective to maintain this industrial and science base on its own account, quite apart from its contribution to our own defence capability.
Ann Feltham: That is one of the reasons why we look, as an organisation, at alternatives to arms industry employment. One of the reasons why the arms industry is so successful is that it is pretty well the only industry in the UK that the Government subsidise and support to that extent. A lot of other industry has been allowed to disappear, but the arms industry has been supported throughout all.
Having said that, our own research has shown that there are alternative jobs, particularly in the renewable sector. There is a shortage of the skills that are currently trapped in the arms industry. As you rightly say, there are very highly skilled people in it, but their skills could be used elsewhere if the Government were prepared to shift their support into something such as the renewables industry. We would very much advocate that, because it would also mean that the UK could be more secure. We could be less dependent on energy from overseas, so it is a win-win situation. It would also tackle climate change, which is a cause of instability.
Q13 Crispin Blunt: But while the United Kingdom decides to have a defence policy of the current shape and structure that it does, the dichotomy you identify between Alistair Burt going off to negotiate a treaty that regulates the industry and other Ministers and parts of the Government, including the Defence Export Services Organisation, promoting the industry is going to exist. Presumably, you can accept and understand that.
Ann Feltham: It is a choice Governments have made, and it is a choice we seek to get them to change. We are advocating a change away from supporting military industries to supporting others such as renewables.
Q14 Crispin Blunt: But unless we get into the business of conventional defence disarmament to a very substantial extent, and a very different security posture as a country, would you accept that it is not really reasonable for you to expect the United Kingdom not to be engaged in the arms trade? In the circumstances, the best way for us to be engaged in the arms trade is in a properly regulated and overseen way, as the Government would maintain that they do, not least through the work of this Committee, as well as through an international treaty they support and ministerial oversight of the licensing system.
Ann Feltham: There have been improvements in the licensing system to the extent that it is now far more transparent than it was before 1997. The setting up of this Committee to monitor that, in its quadripartite phase and now, is very welcome indeed. There have been consolidated criteria. I do not think the arms trade treaty has added much to that, but you will have to question my counterparts from Amnesty and Oxfam and the other organisation, Saferworld, which advocated an arms trade treaty, to see what they think about it. From our point of view, once there were criteria and far more transparency, we had more information with which to have a good debate about the issue. The arms trade treaty, as far as I can see, has not added to that.
Q15 Chair: You keep mentioning the word “transparency”, which is good. We can all agree that we have moved with great strides in that area. Bearing in mind that we will come on to Saudi Arabia in the next set of questions, do you see our licensing system as robust?
Ann Feltham: No. As I said, promotion always takes priority. In many ways, the licensing system then looks like a paper exercise. If a Prime Minister has gone out there to argue for arms exports, the Export Control Organisation is not going to refuse a licence.
Q16 Chair: Thank you. Going back to Crispin’s first question, I think you agreed that the primary role of Government is to defend its citizens. I think you agreed with that premise. Do you think that other countries have the right to defend their citizens?
Ann Feltham: When I said I agreed that that was its first role, I did not mean militarily. Personally, I do not think that is the case, and in our organisation there is a spread of views on it. I know that the current way that people are spending money on the military is not doing anything to defend the UK’s citizens; I would say for other countries it is likewise.
Q17 Chair: I am specifically asking about other countries and whether they have the right to defend their citizens.
Ann Feltham: The United States, for instance, certainly has the right to defend its citizens, but putting guns into the hands of many of its citizens or allowing guns to get into their hands is not defending its citizens. There is a right to security for everyone in the world, but I do not think the way it is currently approached is fulfilling that.
Q18 Chair: On your last comment that it is right that countries should defend their citizens, do you think that they should be purchasing arms to be able to do that?
Ann Feltham: No.
Q19 Chair: How else would you suggest they defend their citizens?
Ann Feltham: They are not using the arms they are purchasing in large part to defend their citizens. They are using them in a prestige way in some of their own countries. The Foreign Affairs Committee in the last Parliament actually spelt out that if the UK sold weapons to Bahrain, for instance, it sent with them a message of support for the Bahraini Government, which is currently repressing its own people. There is a report in the paper again this morning about that; more people are being detained. It is not defending its citizens by purchasing UK weaponry. It is repressing its citizens indirectly by purchasing UK weaponry, because it says, “The UK doesn’t care about these people you put in prison; the UK cares about selling weaponry to your leaders.”
Q20 Chair: Before I ask Ann to comment, I have one last question. What do you think of the view that, if we do not export arms, another country will?
Ann Feltham: I think it is an argument that the Labour Government stopped using. It is not a good moral argument at all. I also think that, because we have counterparts in other countries—France is usually the one that is mentioned—they are tackling that argument too. “If the French don’t sell them, the UK will.” It gets asked all around the world and it has to stop somewhere. It is really an immoral argument, in my view.
Q21 Ann Clwyd: I want to bring you on to Saudi Arabia, which is very much in the news. Do you believe that the UK’s sales of defence equipment to Saudi Arabia are illegal?
Ann Feltham: We are challenging it. We have applied for judicial review. The application for permission is being heard tomorrow morning. If we get permission, there will be a full hearing. We think it is illegal. The consolidated criteria about weaponry being sold say that, where there is a clear risk that it might be used in violation of international humanitarian law, the weaponry should not be sold. There are numerous reports from really credible organisations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and not least the UN panel of experts set up by the Security Council; all of them have reported back on numerous examples of breaches of international humanitarian law by the Saudi-led coalition.
The Home Office country information and guidance on Yemen says that there is indiscriminate violence on both sides—the Houthis as well as the Saudi-led coalition. Even that admits that there is violence on both sides and that it is indiscriminate. The UK Government have admitted that they have continued to supply weaponry and it is being used—the aircraft and the Paveway bombs. In fact, they said in written evidence to your Committee in your Yemen inquiry that they had actually accelerated the delivery of the Paveway bombs, so they do not deny that the weaponry is being sold.
The criteria do not demand absolute evidence that a particular piece of UK weaponry has been used in a particular human rights violation. It is anticipating; it is looking forward. Campaign Against Arms Trade thinks that if there is a clear risk that it might be used—I think there really is a clear risk that any UK equipment might be used—that is illegal. That is why we are challenging the continued export in the High Court.
Q22 Ann Clwyd: It is, as you know, quite difficult to prove that weapons are being used in a certain way. In cases involving East Timor and Indonesia, certain allegations were made about the use of weaponry against East Timor. It was very difficult to prove. Do you accept that it is difficult?
Ann Feltham: I think this is very different. The Government in that case said, “We can’t prove that UK weaponry is being used in East Timor.” In this case the UK Government have accepted that their weaponry is being used by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, so it is quite a different case. There has been no denial from the UK Government on that score.
Q23 Ann Clwyd: How would you respond to the argument that our defence exports to Saudi Arabia underpin an important alliance with a key strategic partner in the region? Do those sorts of arguments carry any weight with you at all?
Ann Feltham: It is not a strategic partner many would feel very comfortable with. Even before it started bombing Yemen, its human rights record was abysmal. All the major publications that look at human rights, the Economist Intelligence Unit and Freedom House, had it ranked as one of the world’s worst regimes. In fact, it was lower than Syria until the recent chaos in Syria. It has really had an appalling human rights record for years and years, yet the UK Government have courted it because it had oil and some wealth. Throughout all those years they have completely overlooked all those misdemeanours. They pulled the Serious Fraud Office investigation, as you know. It is a corrupt regime, a human rights abusing regime and now it is a murderous regime with regard to Yemen; and still the UK Government defend those links. It is not a partner I am happy with.
Q24 Ann Clwyd: Do you therefore think that the UK Government should suspend all defence exports to Saudi Arabia, or merely suspend them until the resolution of the conflict in Yemen?
Ann Feltham: I think they should definitely suspend them.
Q25 Ann Clwyd: Is it solely Saudi Arabia’s conduct of operations in Yemen that you oppose?
Ann Feltham: No. As I said, it is the human rights abuse generally. As I mentioned with Bahrain, it is sending a signal of support to Saudi Arabia by selling them the arms exports. Prime Ministers Tony Blair, Margaret Thatcher before him and David Cameron have all been out to Saudi Arabia to sell arms. Prince Charles has been out to Saudi Arabia to sell arms. That is sending a message to the Saudi regime that its behaviour is acceptable, when it really is off- the-scale unacceptable.
Q26 Chair: The final question is from me, unless any colleagues want to come in. We had a vote last week to leave the EU. From your organisation’s perspective, what are the implications of that vote, first on the defence industry in the UK and, secondly, on our international obligations?
Ann Feltham: For both, the Brexit vote may not have huge implications. COARM, the EU Committee that looks after the arms export control side, includes countries that are not EU members, so other EU countries conform to the EU’s regulations on arms exports. Conversely, the arms industry and research side at the EU also contain countries that are not EU members. Both of those do not seem to be continuous with the EU as such.
On the industry side, exports might be cheaper from the UK, but exports contain 40% imported components so those will be more expensive. You were talking about military equipment. The big-ticket items are going to cost more if they are imported, as with the F-35s, probably from the United States. On that score, on the financial side, it is swings and roundabouts.
Ironically, for our own organisation, we have just been part of setting up and employing a European Union programme officer for the European Network Against Arms Trade, who was going to monitor the increasing presence of the arms industry in Brussels. There are a lot of things, and we are no more clear as to what is going to happen long term than you are, but what I can say is that campaigners around Europe and beyond are going to continue opposing the arms trade whether the UK is in Europe or outside Europe.
Chair: On that note, thank you very much for your time this morning. We reserve the right to write to you if we need clarification on any points you have raised. Thank you very much for coming.
Oral evidence: The Arms Trade Treaty, HC 428 8