Human rights groups condemn steep rise in UK arms sales to Saudis

More than £1bn worth of bombs, missiles and rockets were sold under government licence to Saudi Arabia over three months last summer, according to human rights groups.

The extraordinary increase in sales, which coincided with a surge of airstrikes by a Saudi-led coalition on Houthi rebels in Yemen, was condemned by Saferworld, which campaigns against arms sales to repressive regimes.

Last month Saferworld and Amnesty commissioned a legal opinion from Professor Philippe Sands QC and other lawyers which concluded that British arms sales to Saudi Arabia, in the context of its military intervention and bombing campaign in Yemen, were breaking national, EU and international law.

UK arms sales in the three-month period from July to September 2015 for the export category that covers missiles, rockets and bombs amounted to £1,066,216,510, the BIS documents show. They were sold under five separate licences. In the preceding three-month period, sales to Saudi Arabia for the same category of munitions amounted to only £9m. Saferworld condemned the extraordinarily steep increase.

“All of these are for air force end use, with the components for air-to-surface rockets for training purposes,” a Saferworld spokesperson said. 

“The day after the prime minister [David Cameron] claimed to be ‘trying to encourage a political process in Yemen’ and declared ‘there is no military solution in Yemen’, official figures reveal that in just the three months July to September, the government approved the sale of over £1bn worth of bombs for the use of the Royal Saudi Air Force. 

“This is the same air force that has bombed hospitals, schools, markets, grain warehouses, ports and a displaced persons camp and helped to turn Yemen into a living nightmare. That’s a 100-fold increase over the previous three months.”

Allan Hogarth, Amnesty International UK’s head of policy, said: “These figures are deeply worrying, showing that the UK continued to dispatch huge amounts of weaponry to Saudi Arabia despite overwhelming evidence that the Saudi war machine was laying waste to Yemeni homes, schools and hospitals.

“As officials were signing off these sales, hundreds – possibly thousands – of Yemeni civilians were dying in a terrifying barrage of indiscriminate Saudi airstrikes in the country.