UK arms transfer controls
As one of the world’s biggest arms exporters, the UK has a responsibility to ensure that its arms exports do not fuel armed conflict or facilitate human rights abuses. Saferworld works to help the UK meet this responsibility by promoting rigorous and effective rules on international arms transfers.
We monitor and assess UK arms transfer licensing to strengthen controls and make decision-making on arms transfers more open. To do this, we work with the defence industry, parliamentarians and through the UK NGO Working Group on Arms, with partners Amnesty International, Landmine Action, Omega Research Foundation and Oxfam GB.
During the last decade the UK has completely overhauled its arms transfer control legislation (Export Control Act 2002) and followed this up with a review process (2007). Saferworld has been involved throughout these processes, working to identify and then suggest responses to loopholes in the law. Progress has been made in a number of areas, for example in controlling arms brokers regulating intangible transfers of technology (e.g. sending blueprints by email) and improving transparency. While there is still more to do in these areas—for example, the scope of brokering controls could be widened and more information could be made publicly available on the intended end-use and end-user of authorised transfers—advances in recent years have been significant.
However, additional challenges remain. Current controls placed on UK items after they have left UK territory fall well short of international best-practice and need to be improved. For example, the UK seldom requires recipient countries to ask for UK permission before re-exporting UK-sourced arms, and the UK does not reserve the right to monitor the end-use of exports.
Saferworld is currently working with Peers in the House of Lords on a Private Member's Bill calling for the introduction of re-export controls on UK arms and has subsequently provided technical assistance during the passage of the bill. Watch the bill being debated in the Lords.
The national system is also struggling to cope with the fresh challenges posed by changing patterns of defence production such as a greater use of civilian technologies in military production, and the Europeanisation and globalisation of the defence sector, which can result in poorly controlled or uncontrolled UK technology and components being used in military goods produced elsewhere. In addition, the Government has seemed reluctant so far to address the problem of foreign traders organising their affairs through UK registered “shell” or “brass plate” companies.
The UK is an influential country in the field of arms transfer controls and so by influencing its approach, we also seek to promote broader international change in multi-lateral organisations such as the EU and the UN. As part of this we supported the UK Government delegation at the UN biennial conference on small arms control in June 2010.
