Arms Export Controls Committees
Oral evidence: 2017 Arms Export Controls Annual Report, HC 1809
Wednesday 22 May 2019
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 22 May 2019.
Members present: Graham P. Jones (Chair); Ann Clwyd; Chris Law; Dr Julian Lewis; Mark Menzies; Lloyd Russell-Moyle; Stephen Twigg; Catherine West.
Marcus Fysh also attended, pursuant to Standing Order No. 137A(1)(e).
Questions 122-142
Witness
I: Brian Wood, Independent Consultant.
Witness: Brian Wood.
Q122 Chair: Thank you, Brian, for appearing before the Committee and for giving Committee members the opportunity to ask some questions as part of our ongoing inquiry. I would like to start straightaway by asking you about the Government’s most recent annual report on arms export controls 2017. Have you discerned any improvements in the 2017 report, and since then, in terms of arms export controls?
Brian Wood: I would say that there have not been dramatic improvements. It is good that an example was given on Indonesia concerning risk assessment; that is a positive step. I doubt that that harms or alienates the Indonesian authorities, and it certainly alerts Indonesian civil society. I would like to see more of that. I do not think it would harm the UK. We can come back to that.
The reason I say that is because scrutiny of the decision making is very difficult when the details—even generic data—about deliveries or actual transfers are not available. You can sift, till the cows come home, through the licence numbers, the list of countries and the military list numbers—or whatever other categories there are—and you still will not know exactly what that is. For example, civil society and the media will get hold of licensing data and interpret it, perhaps misleadingly, because the Government is not making that data available.
We know that there are commercial confidentiality and national security considerations, but there should be a clever way of providing generic data, because then you can have an intelligent discussion. I think CAEC itself should have access to very detailed data, so that you can also subject decision-making to scrutiny. Otherwise, you can never reliably say that responsible decisions have been taken—you can guess.
I think, in Sweden for example, they have that system where the parliamentary committee gets access to a lot of information. That happens in some countries but does not yet happen here. The United Kingdom has, in some ways, been a leader in trying to get better controls, but I work a lot in United Nations forums and in other inter-governmental organisation contexts, and I think that over the last two or three years, we have seen a sliding back of UK leadership.
In the report, the mentions of the Arms Trade Treaty are not really sufficient. If you take the section on Brexit, for example—okay, we do not know exactly what is going to happen—the fact is that the United Kingdom already has obligations under the treaty. The treaty addresses a whole range of things, including export risk assessment and certain prohibitions. I take the view that the Government should be developing detailed guidance on the interpretation and implementation of the treaty.
What does “overriding risk” in article 7 mean? When I asked one of the senior officials, “Could we have a briefing on how you want to interpret that concept?” I was told that it was strictly confidential. We understand that if something is in the works, they do not want to let it out, but we cannot have the United Kingdom breaching the provisions of an overarching treaty to which 100 or more states are party, which it is doing on import.
Q123 Chair: I want to come back to a point that you made on the presentation of data, which was a key point in our own report last year, with a section on that about the Government reporting arms export control data in a much friendlier and better format and with some more detail. That is a concern of ours. We will have the Ministers at our next evidence session—the one after the second hearing this afternoon—in a month’s time. That issue will be raised. The Committee is as concerned as you.
On your point about the detail in some of the licences, there has clearly been criticism of the open licences in particular. When you referred to some of the detail, I presume that open licences are of concern to you. Could you share with the Committee your concerns about any of the licences and where you think there are issues around transparency?
Brian Wood: As soon as you flag up countries that have a poor record of human rights observance, you immediately start wondering, if it is an ML1, ML2 or ML3 category, whether there is a possibility that the internal security forces are committing certain violations.
Q124 Chair: I just want to talk about the licences, though, and the particular types of licences. Please refer to the licences and your concerns about them and the current licence structure.
Brian Wood: I have read the concerns of your Committees about the trend towards the open general licences, meaning the export licences and the trade control licences, which cover brokering and other trading activities. I agree that it is not good enough to move towards those open general licences on the grounds that that will save some time and money, when the licensees are not under obligation to report regularly and consistently on their activities. They are subjected to a registration requirement, but once they have got that, they can trade or export to multiple destinations across a big range of products and there is virtually no information available on what they do.
Of course, in the case of Saudi Arabia, that is different, because there is an international defence co-operation agreement. You are talking about big ticket items that are known in the public domain and the companies are known so, by and large, there is a debate about the extent to which the Government has implemented the criteria. Because the Campaign Against Arms Trade had initiated the judicial review, a lot of information was put into the public domain, so there is a debate—in my view, a very healthy debate—as to what has gone on there and what the considerations were.
You know that I used to head the Amnesty International work. I remember when the Saudi air force began systematic bombing of the north of Yemen in August 2009. That continued through to January. The United Nations said at the time that almost 240,000 people were displaced. There were a lot of people killed and injured. When the photographs started coming into our office, it looked like Gaza. It was pretty devastating. We, of course, tried to find out what the Government were doing—there is the Middle East department of the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence. What can you do to try to get restraint? We did a report on it that went to the Americans and the UK authorities. The idea that the alleged violations by the Saudi air force began in March 2015 is not true. It happened much earlier.
The reason why I am saying that is that under the Arms Trade Treaty, part of the provision of article 7 requires a Government to take mitigation measures. I think that has been misunderstood by a lot of people. It was changed at the last minute by the Australian chair of the Arms Trade Treaty conference. The way it is written is that the overriding risk is the risk that overrides once the mitigation measures that are available are taken. So the mitigation measures are not simply to reduce the risk; they are to reduce the risk to the level where the negative consequences that are listed are not going to occur—serious violations of IHL, human rights, undermining peace and security and so on. It is the mitigation measures that need to be questioned, and there are a lot of mitigation measures that could be taken.
Q125 Chair: Brian, can I stop you there? A lot of Members want to ask you questions, which is a credit to you. If your answers could be a bit shorter, I can try to get more questions in.
Brian Wood: I will try.
Chair: Of course, there are hundreds of thousands fleeing the rebels in Yemen in refugee camps as well. I put that on the record.
Q126 Stephen Twigg: Brian, thanks for your evidence. I very much agree with your point about sliding back in terms of UK leadership.
Looking at the Arms Trade Treaty more generally at this point, how effective has it been as a tool, not just in terms of UK policy, but internationally?
Brian Wood: I think it is early days, because it is a big mountain to climb for developing countries. I have been in training workshops in different countries and, for example, in Ghana the Government has to amend something like 24 different pieces of legislation in order to bring the Arms Trade Treaty into its domestic law. They have capacity problems. We had every Department and intelligence, customs, police, defence—everybody—in the room, and I was asking them whether they had this and whether they had that. There is still a long way to go. I was in Georgia with officials from central Asia and it was pretty much the same thing, and in southern Africa it was pretty much the same thing.
It is good that the UK funds the Voluntary Trust Fund. That is good. It needs all the funds it can get. But the committee that supervises it needs to be very effective in allocating funds for the projects.
What happens in many countries is that the officials are often the most committed and most knowledgeable, so there is no problem there; the problem is that when you get to the Minister, the Minister sometimes says, “Oh, did we sign that? Do you mean that we really have to publicise this; we have to report on our imports and exports? Oh, I didn’t know that.” That is where they go into reverse, so the international civil society is trying to have a dialogue with parliamentarians in order to speak with the Ministers and say, “Look, it is in your enlightened self-interest to implement the treaty and to do these things.”
So that is where we are. You heard President Trump say that they are going to un-sign the treaty. You cannot actually un-sign the treaty. Once you have signed it, it is there; the Secretary-General is the depository. So that is just too bad. But we know that Trump is not going to support multilateral controls.
China announced that they might sign the treaty. We are not naive about China, I don’t think, but there is a move towards more and more states signing up and it is really important that the UK provides leadership. But you cannot be a credible leader if you are in breach of the treaty. The issue about not reporting on the imports is a sore, but the bigger stain on the UK’s reputation is Yemen. Whatever you argue, it is there all the time. I speak to a lot of diplomats and officials, as well as the NGOs, and it is there all the time in the side meetings, so something has to give.
I take the point, though, Chair, that all sides have been committing the most horrific violations. Civil society has been saying that. It reminds me of when we used to try to think of what to do about apartheid South Africa, when the state forces were so powerful. The fact that we had an arms embargo made a very big difference. Even though there were other, irresponsible actors, we were able to put enough pressure on them to bring them to the negotiation table. So that is the way I would view it, from a strategic point of view.
Q127 Stephen Twigg: I agree with you entirely on Yemen. I have just one more question, which is on the presumption of denial. The Government has rejected the concept of a presumption of denial in respect of open licences. We floated a presumption of denial either for countries that had not signed the treaty or for countries that are on the FCO’s list of human rights priority countries. What is your view of why the Government has rejected the idea of a presumption of denial, which would strengthen—
Brian Wood: I agree with what the Committee and the Chair have said about not being a party to the ATT. I think that is tricky, because some states have become parties to the ATT or signed it, and have done almost nothing. In fact, they work against the treaty sometimes, so that is not a cutting-edge threshold, as far as I am concerned. It may be one day, when it has built up and the treaty regime is really working. You could say, “Okay, enough is enough. We will discriminate.” When it comes to the countries where the Government reports human rights concerns, all I would say is: do not get hung up on the semantics. What needs to happen is additional, deep-level scrutiny—that is what people are saying. You can call it presumption of denial or enhanced scrutiny. What happens with risk assessment—I have seen this over the years—is that it can be done superficially. Is there an end-use certificate? Who is transporting it? Or there can be a deep assessment at the institutional level. Those countries that show problems of human rights need that much deeper assessment done.
Stephen Twigg: Thank you. That is really helpful.
Q128 Ann Clwyd: In her evidence, Dr Anna Stavrianakis described the Government’s application of the criteria as reckless rather than robust. What is your assessment?
Brian Wood: I think that you could make a good argument for that in certain cases. It depends over what time period you are looking, but I said earlier that it is very difficult when you do not have the data. Sometimes a lot of criticism is made that there are rifles going to Egypt. Subsequently, it is discovered that they were going to Egypt in order to be picked up for the anti-piracy operations. Then it becomes an issue of, “Why do they need so many?” But they were not going, in fact, to the Egyptian security forces who were committing violations. The issue of transparency is critical, but when it comes to countries such as Yemen—I would say Bahrain is another one, and in the past we had Israel, although I saw the Chair’s letter about the sniper rifles and ammunition to test. There, we have a trickier issue. Is the Israeli company developing a capacity to produce sniper rifles, in the context where its own security forces are committing extrajudicial executions against protesting Palestinians? I think that is wrong. It should be probed further.
Chair: We do lots of probing.
Brian Wood: Amnesty International just published a report with our section in Israel about the exports of arms from Israel. If you read that, you will see that the exports were going to Myanmar/Burma and other countries of great concern. We have to look at what is happening further down the line with diversion and re-export. In the Arms Trade Treaty, it is article 11 that is the issue. Some of the big alert signs that go up are to do with small arms, light weapons and ammunition, but they are also to do with armoured vehicles. In the past, we even saw armoured Land Rovers going to Sudan to be used in Darfur. Sometimes, people have used the term “non-lethal”: “We are just supplying non-lethal equipment.” That is completely erroneous, because those armoured Land Rovers are being kitted out with heavy machine guns in the armouries in Khartoum and then put into the field. You have to look at the whole thing. The trouble we have is in finding the relevant information.
Q129 Ann Clwyd: How well do you think the UK compares with other countries in the application of the criteria?
Brian Wood: No one does a complete analysis, but if you look at the exports from China and Russia, you could argue that they are sometimes more reckless. However, I do not think that should be an excuse for the UK not to adopt the highest standards. The allies of the UK in the international domain are the European Union member states and certain others—Australia, Canada and so on. But there are also a lot of countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and Asia, which all look at the UK.
I remember being in a room with the most senior policy officials in Geneva. When other people left the room, I took the chance to ask how many of them were aware of the United Nations basic principles on the use of force and firearms, which lays down the rules for the way that police and soldiers use firearms in a domestic situation, a non-armed conflict situation. I asked them to put their hands up. Not a single one of them knew. We all laughed. I said to them, “The trouble is that those instruments form the standards by which the assessments have to be made. That is the threshold.”
When I was in Rome once, I was with the export team. They had exported machine guns to Algeria, and we were questioning that, because there were a lot of killings by that unit. They said, “Well, Amnesty didn’t publish a report last year, so we just thought that we could let it go.” I said, “That is not a good reason, because Amnesty cannot cover everything. You have an embassy there. You need to look more thoroughly.” Then they said, “But then we would be interfering in their internal affairs.” I said, “That is nonsense. You have all signed up to these standards in the United Nations, so you are in it together.” Then they turned around and pointed out the window and said, “The thing is, the experts on international human rights law and IHL are in that building over there, and we here are just the merchants of death,” and then they laughed. It is shocking—it was some years ago.
Q130 Ann Clwyd: Why do you think the Germans have managed to block arms exports to Saudi Arabia? Was that using the same criteria or do they have a different set of criteria?
Brian Wood: That is a good question. A number of countries in the EU and outside the EU have stopped licences to export to Saudi Arabia. Germany is the biggest country to have done that. I know that the Foreign Secretary has been to Berlin, to try to argue the case to continue, but the Germans did not like that one bit. The French also tried the same thing.
There is a problem, because of interoperability. Parts and components have become a massive part of the international arms trade. Germany is quite progressive. It is putting a lot of effort into promoting the Arms Trade Treaty internationally. It invests a lot of money in the small arms programmes, civil society and research. The European Union outreach programme on the Arms Trade Treaty is led by Germany. France has just joined in. Okay, we are heading towards Brexit, so I suppose that is why the UK was not in it. Germany is a leader in that.
The problem is that Rheinmetall, which is one of the large German companies making munitions, is still exporting munitions to Saudi Arabia from its factory in Sardinia. It has a South African factory as well, which is doing the same thing. President Zuma actually went to Saudi Arabia to open a new factory, which I thought was a bit crazy in the current circumstances. It is not really good enough for a country to say, “We’re stopping, but we’ll allow it through the back door.” What is happening in Germany, and in Italy and South Africa, is that civil society are challenging them. They want it to be consistent.
I believe that if the EU all clubbed together and said to the Saudis and the Emiratis, “Look, we know all sides are committing violations—we know of all these problems—but this is a massive humanitarian catastrophe. Millions of children are on the edge of starvation. They are suffering from cholera and other diseases. They are getting killed”—
Q131 Chair: Brian, could I ask you to—
Brian Wood: We do have to push the envelope.
Q132 Ann Clwyd: So you would say the ban is legitimate?
Brian Wood: I would say it has to be done, but the lesson learned is that no action was taken in 2009 or before. To put many of the eggs of UK defence into the Saudi basket seems strategically very stupid. It is the long term.
I will just say one more thing. The arms ISIS had in its arsenal—we did a big research project on that in Amnesty, as did Conflict Armament Research—are from roughly 100 countries. Most of the ammunition from the earlier period is Chinese or Russian—or Soviet—but the ammunition from the more recent period is from the United States. They captured a lot of weaponry, but after the invasion under General Petraeus, a lot of weaponry was flown in from the Balkans and handed out to armed groups. If you look at the United States Department of Defence auditors’ reports, some 300,000 Kalashnikovs went missing. Saddam Hussein had already proliferated those kinds of weapons among society, but the Americans were also doing it. When those Sunni—
Q133 Chair: You might find the Iranians also supplied a lot of them—but anyway.
Brian Wood: I beg your pardon?
Chair: The Iranians supplied the vast bulk of them.
Brian Wood: The Iranians did as well—absolutely. The point is that the timelines in this game are much longer than we often are led to believe.
Q134 Chris Law: We were looking at a report last year about the Government looking to scope end-use auditing of arms exports. We got information from both Switzerland and Germany about what they are doing with end-use verification checks, mainly on small arms shipments. Should the UK be doing that? A lot of us on the Committees think the answer is yes. How practical is that, and how soon could it be implemented in the UK?
Brian Wood: This is auditing of—
Chris Law: Small firearms and their end use—where they end up.
Brian Wood: The term “end-use verification” is sometimes used to refer to whether the arms have arrived in the hands of the end user named on the end-use certificate. There is another term, “end-use monitoring”, which is ongoing monitoring.
Q135 Chris Law: That is more what we are looking at, yes.
Brian Wood: You can put the two together, because they are related. End-use monitoring has been raised with the Committees by the German Government in their proposal, but the origins of this are really in the United States, with the Blue Lantern programme. That is not a law enforcement mechanism. It is a fact-finding organisation that has skilled people who go out and check what the end users are doing: are they storing the stuff safely? How are they using them? The agreements are made when the export licences are agreed, so that the recipients know that they have to do that.
Q136 Chris Law: One issue that was raised was that it may be sold to one country, and that country decides to then sell it on to another country that we would not be selling to directly.
Brian Wood: Absolutely. That whole issue of re-export controls is vital. They vary because sometimes, if the equipment is very sensitive, the Americans will say, “You cannot export that without our permission, or else.”
Q137 Chris Law: Do you think that is a suitable model for the UK? Can it be implemented?
Brian Wood: I think it is a suitable model for larger states. Switzerland does quite a lot in that area, and have done for a number of years; they are not a big country, but they do it. Other countries have had these visits. Even South Africa sent a delegation to Colombia, for example. They were exporting assault rifles there and were under fire from the parliament, so they had to send a team to Colombia to check what was happening with the rifles; the Government was under pressure to cancel the whole contract because of what was happening in Colombia.
It happens more than you think; it is an aspect of arms control that needs refining and enhancement. In Amnesty we were able to alert the Blue Lantern staff sometimes, when we saw something going really wrong, and say, “Are you aware of this?” Of course, we did not have any official standing but they were able to go in and check things. The UK has done it where there have been UK troops on the ground: Afghanistan and those sorts of places.
Q138 Chris Law: Would you describe it more as a laissez-faire approach, rather than a more formalised approach?
Brian Wood: That is just ad hoc.
Chris Law: Exactly.
Brian Wood: What the Germans have done is they have started this, modestly. They are in the first stage, so they have just chosen three countries—I think you have mentioned this in your report.
Chair: We have.
Brian Wood: It is by agreement. It is just small arms and light weapons at the moment.
Q139 Chris Law: Following on from that, you have mentioned the US Blue Lantern system. What lessons do you think we could learn from them here in the UK? An additional question, if you don’t mind: as we know, small arms and ammunition often leak into civil war zones—what more could we be doing there? Do we need more stringent brokering systems in place, in order to make a difference?
Brian Wood: Absolutely. It is hard to find Enfield rifles being used in atrocities. The UK is not a massive trader in those, but what does happen—
Q140 Chair: Brian, could you refer back to the Blue Lantern? I think the Committee is interested in that question and I know Mark is going to come to brokering in a minute. Can we leave brokering—Mark is keen to ask that—and say something about the Blue Lantern?
Brian Wood: Yes. As I say, it is not a law enforcement programme; it is fact finding. They send teams out, they do site visits and they check documents. I have typed up a list of all the things they do. I was told I could submit a written report after the meeting; maybe that would help? We have had presentations from the Blue Lantern senior staff at the United Nations in Geneva. You could request a briefing from them directly. They are very interesting and revealing briefings.
One of the things they do is check on the reliability of the end user. They have a watch list in the United States, which is not a ban list; it is just a list that says, “If somebody or a company is on this list, there needs to be extra checking.” It may be that, behind the screen, there are other lists like that—I don’t know—but I think some of the techniques that they use could be useful. The problem with the United States system is not at that technical level; it is at the political level.
Chair: Could I move on to Mark? I am really conscious that we are struggling for time.
Q141 Mark Menzies: I will try to keep this quite tight in the interests of time. We have heard continued concerns about brokerage, brass-plate companies and extraterritoriality. What action can the UK take to allay those concerns? On the back of that, what scope do you see for end-use checking for brokering?
Brian Wood: There is a bundle of questions there. The consultation that was done on the registering of brokers was not very convincing to me. I was the consultant to the United Nations group on illicit brokering, and I think that some of the questions were not well put. You can see in the answers that the respondents were not really sure what to say. The consultations with other states were not very broad. There was no discussion with the Americans, who are the ones who have run the register for a long time. The first questions talked about publicising individuals’ details. Well, I do not think the Americans do that, so why start the consultation with those sorts of questions? It is almost prompting the respondents to say, “No, we don’t really want to do that.”
We have registration with the open general licences. What we need more of is an aspect that sorts out the fit and proper, because, for example, in one of the court cases in 2012, the person involved had been prosecuted in relation to arms supply, but was still given a general open trade control licence and a section 5 authority to handle firearms. In the court case, it came out that they were using shell companies in Hong Kong and Cyprus, and were doing deals with North Korea. The quantities were breath-taking. You are talking about 1 million pistols, hundreds of thousands of second-hand rifles and surface-to-air missiles to embargoed countries. The auditors went in—they have to do that—and did not spot anything. They gave a clean bill of health to the trader. I prepared a narrative on that after reading all the court documents. It is too long to read, but I can give it to you in writing. I think it will perhaps shock you as much as me.
There is another case, which I was just asked to help with, involving the syphoning off of more than $100 million from an African country for a money laundering and arms trafficking network that stretches to Eastern Europe.
Q142 Chair: I have to say before the Committee that my advice is that if you are going to say such things, there needs to be some empirical evidence. If you cannot provide that today, please provide it in writing. We cannot just total up anecdotal evidence; we need something with at least some authority and some veracity.
Brian Wood: Oh, yes—there are hundreds of documents in that case. With almost every investigation of violations of United Nations arms embargoes, if you read the reports you will see that shell companies are a major problem.
In this country, what can be done? The beneficiaries need to be declared, otherwise you do not know who is behind it. I know that Companies House has just announced a consultation and it says that it would need to know who manages and who controls the company, but if you do not know who the beneficiary is, you do not know who is behind it, because it is a company run by another company run by another and another. I believe that the Insolvency Act would empower the Government to dissolve the company. The problem is that you find that these cases are prosecuted and the company just carries on ad infinitum.
Chair: Thank you, Brian. We are really pressed for time, so I must apologise, but we are very grateful for you coming to the Committee today and giving evidence.
I would just like to say, as well as saying thank you, that we do have a slight issue. Could I ask members of the public perhaps just to leave for a couple of minutes whilst the Committee sits to discuss an issue that has arisen? It is nothing serious, but could you all please leave?
Brian Wood: As I said, I am very happy to provide you with material.
Chair: Thank you very much, Brian, for your attendance. The Committee greatly appreciates it.