Select Committee on Defence Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 120 - 139)

WEDNESDAY 3 NOVEMBER 1999

RT HON ROBIN COOK, MP, MR PETER RICKETTS, MR PAUL HARE AND MR IAN BAILEY

  120. We do not know because there is no transparency in the arrangements whether or not the criteria are being followed. Some of the regimes that are mentioned have not got a particularly happy record in their domestic affairs.
  (Mr Cook) If you are talking about government to government transfers we do actually include that in this year's Report.

  121. Which I received about half an hour ago.
  (Mr Cook) I was not chiding, I was merely taking pride in the fact of what we have done. I think you will find at page 128, if you turn there, first of all a description which starts on that page and which also provides a small table at the bottom of it.

  122. Thank you very much for that.
  (Mr Cook) In a way I am grateful you have asked me about it because this is additional information which was not actually available in the 1997 Report. You are quite right, it was not there.

Chairman

  123. I expect we will come back to that aspect because when one reads page 128 it is a very general statement, it does not include volumes and values. We will return to that point.
  (Mr Cook) The volumes issue, of course, takes us to the big issue we had earlier on, Ted, which is not that we are not committed to providing the actual volumes. As I said earlier, I have considerable reservations about that. On the table it does give the detail of the major equipment, it does specify what they were, where they went and the number of them.

  Chairman: We will pursue, if we may, one of the criteria relating to the economy of the recipient country.

Ann Clwyd

  124. Paragraph 11(c) of the July 1997 criteria refers to consideration being given to "whether the purchase would seriously undermine the economy of the recipient country, taking into account ... a variety of factors" and criterion 8 of the EU Code broadly reflects that concern. The Government's reply to the recent Report of the International Development Committee, which had been critical of the granting of licences to Indonesia despite objections raised by DfID on the grounds of the cumulative impact of arms exports on development—I have always thought that was very unsatisfactory. I wondered what consideration you have given to developing explicit criteria for determining what constitutes excessive military expenditure in order to assist in determining the extent to which arms exports may potentially undermine development by diverting resources away from social spending? In the case of Indonesia, twice as much was spent on arms imports than on the Health Service. In our Select Committee on International Development the impact of excessive military expenditure on the social development of a country is supposed to be a criterion now. I wonder how much it impacts on your decision making?
  (Mr Cook) This is precisely why DfID is now one of the four Departments which is consulted in the process of processing licence application. DfID receives the notification that those applications have been received. They are compiled in the same way as the Foreign Office and the MoD can request to see any and in the last year they asked to see 1,700 of them. DfID can submit its views where it believes that the particular purchase might be a disproportionate burden on the economy of the country that is seeking to purchase it and it then becomes part of the collective process. On the question of Indonesia, do remember that the licences that we have approved since taking office have been very modest in total volume and very small against Indonesia's economy, less than 20 million in the whole of last year.

  125. I wonder exactly what the role of DfID is in all this because we get the impression that it has been rather marginalised. I think in one year it was sent less than ten per cent of the total licences that were being scrutinised.
  (Mr Cook) I think that is a misunderstanding of how the process works.

  126. Could you explain it to us because I think it is unclear.
  (Mr Cook) My understanding is that the DTI produces a list of applications. That list is circulated to the relevant three other departments. It is open to those departments to request to see any application on that list. Therefore, DfID receives the applications it requests to see and last year saw 1,700, which would be roughly speaking something like 34 per cent?
  (Mr Hare) 20 per cent.
  (Mr Cook) 20 per cent of the total volume. To put that in context, do remember that half of all the licence applications are for a sale to other Member States of the European Union, NATO or Australia, New Zealand and I would not have thought there would be a legitimate DfID concern about those applications. So you are starting out then by looking at the other half which relate to countries outside the European Union and NATO, not all of whom would be ones with which DfID would necessarily be concerned, for instance Latin America. So in truth you are probably looking at the 1,700 which DfID received as covering a very high proportion of licence applications relevant to the Third World and the poorer countries with which DfID is concerned.

  127. We have a list of countries for which DfID would like to see all the export licence applications. The suggestion is that it does not see all the ones that it would like to see. Is that the case?
  (Mr Cook) As far as I am aware DfID can ask to see any application it likes even if it is for the United States of America. If it wants to see applications relative to one country as far as I am aware there is nothing to prevent it seeking that. If I am wrong I will correct it with a note to the Committee and if DfID is under a misapprehension we would be very happy to correct it.

  128. So you would refute any suggestion that DfID is being marginalised in this examination of export licences?
  (Mr Cook) My broad experience of the last two and a half years is it is very difficult to marginalise Clare Short.

Mr Worthington

  129. Can I broaden it beyond Indonesia and talk about developing countries. I think the issue is about the criteria, that you can only look in the guidelines on a case-by-case basis. You cannot look, according to the guidelines, at the volume of arms that a particular country is taking in. Our concern is that we are working together now as a Government through the Treasury, through DfID, at issues of debt and saying that if there is going to be debt relief then there should not be at the same time excessive expenditure on arms and yet we have here in this criteria that one can only look at it on a case-by-case basis. Surely there ought to be an alteration to the criteria to say we can take into account how much money this country is spending on armaments.
  (Mr Cook) I think that is absolutely right. The answer is yes we can. What we cannot do, and I think we have got to be honest about this, is purport to provide a cumulative figure for that country because that would require us to know what arms exports they are making from other states, not just from us and so we have to be careful that we do not get ourselves into making a commitment with a spurious accuracy we cannot deliver on, but it would be entirely proper for DfID or any other of the departments to argue that from the data available to us this is a country that is spending more than it should on military purposes; this particular licence is for an expensive product which it cannot afford. Those are perfectly fair and perfectly justified considerations.

  130. The EU Code does not say that. It says "the EU Code is underpinned by the principle that proposed exports are considered on their merits on a case-by-case basis and the refusal of their licences on the basis of cumulative expenditure could be open to challenge by unsuccessful exporters."
  (Mr Cook) I would refer you to our own national criteria, paragraph 11(c), which I think Ann read, which is quite explicit that we take into account "whether the purchase would seriously undermine the economy of the recipient country, taking account of public finance, external debt, economic and social development and any IMF World Bank sponsored economic reform programme." There is a whole range of economic and social indices there which it would be entirely competent to find a case on.

  131. Is there not an anomaly there between the national one and the EU Code?
  (Mr Cook) Can I resist the use of the word "anomaly". They are two different Codes. The Code of Conduct provides a minimum standard for the European Union but explicit in our discussions on it it does not prevent national countries building upon it and taking a wider or a tougher approach. Maybe that is what is happening here. Perhaps it is something that we can look at in future reviews of the Code of Conduct, but I cannot guarantee I will get all other countries to agree.

Dr Godman

  132. Can I just follow up a question put to you by Piara Khabra concerning democratic governments and what happens to arms exports when, say, a democratically elected government is overturned. Might I remind you that at the Scott's shipyard in Greenock in the early 1970s the men used to say in relation to the building of submarines for Allende's Chile that they were working on "socialist" submarines. When Allende was overthrown they re-titled them "fascist" submarines. Might it not be the case that we have an arms exporter exporting small arms (however you define small arms) to a democracy in order to equip or re-equip a democratically accountable police force. What happens if that democratic government is overthrown in a coup? How quickly in those circumstances can such arms exports be suspended or stopped, because it might be that certain arms are decreed entirely legitimate when being exported to a democratic government but might be seen in an entirely different way when a military coup takes place?
  (Mr Cook) If there was a case for an embargo there is no problem, we can apply an embargo and further exports will be halted. We are very keen now to make sure that any embargo of which we are party is an international embargo otherwise the effect is rather lost and in any case it brings it home much better if we can use forums like the European Union to provide a bigger and stronger message. We have one or two countries with whom we have ourselves our own national concerns but by and large we would want to work through the European Union. In the circumstances which you have described, if it was appropriate we would seek an embargo from the European Union and abide by it.

  133. Would that follow a national embargo or would you seek the legitimacy of an international sanction?
  (Mr Cook) We would prefer to start by trying to get agreement within the European Union and, to be fair, it can move fast when there is a requirement for such an embargo. From the start of our proposal for an embargo on Indonesia to the agreement of the Common Position was only five days.

Ann Clwyd

  134. Finally on this section, I asked a question of each of the departments responsible for licensing how many people worked in their departments. Clare Short has one full-time person and three part-time. The DTI are still looking at it. The MoD has not answered at all. Your Department says that it is not possible to give a precise figure for the number of officials involved which makes it sound rather large.
  (Mr Cook) I can assure you that my Department is not a large one.

  135. If you would like to put a number on it, Foreign Secretary, I would be very glad to hear it. The point I am trying to make is that there is not an equal balance within the departments.
  (Mr Cook) First of all, as far as DFID goes, it is entirely a matter for DFID how many staff it puts to work there. That is a matter within their own control and it would be unfair of me to offer them advice. As far as the Foreign Office is concerned, I can ask Mr Hare to report on the total staffing of the Department but that might be misleading. Where I think we have difficulty disaggregating staff is that there is a whole range of people in my building who may at appropriate moments be consulted about licence applications. For instance, every country has a desk officer. If a licence application is of any concern to us that desk officer would be consulted. It would be wrong to aggregate all the desk officers and say that they are all working on licence applications. Similarly, there may be other policy questions that may be considered further up the command chain which could involve other officials in the Foreign Office. It would be really hard to say how many are working on licence applications and pretend that is a meaningful figure. Indeed, the strength of the present system is that the DTI staff can have access to all officials of the Foreign Office who can provide detailed advice of the country and all the staff from the MoD who can provide detailed assessment of the weapons on sale. I think that does give us a very good, very robust system. Equally, we can now tap the knowledge of DfID about the economic and social circumstances of the country. It may not be possible because of the way in which they parallel our structure to analyse that down to one particular staff or another.

Chairman

  136. We need to cover two or three other areas. Have any licences been refused by the United Kingdom or any other Member State on the grounds that we have just been discussing relating to the economy of the country?
  (Mr Cook) I would have to put a note to the Committee, Ted, I could not answer that offhand.

  137. Would you give us a note?
  (Mr Cook) Yes. I am not even sure I can answer that in respect of other countries.

  138. In respect of the United Kingdom.
  (Mr Cook) Yes.

  Chairman: We have touched on it before but it is so important that I think we need to return briefly, if we may, to broaden this out again.

Laura Moffatt

  139. Thank you, Chairman. Foreign Secretary, all of the measures which I believe are positive moves by this Government, looking at the EU Code of Conduct, taking the lead on these issues, publishing this document which is a great step forward, although there is more to be done I know, these are the sorts of things that assure people who may not even have any sense that they want arms trading to go on at all and those who want to be secure that all measures are being taken to ensure that arms are going to the people that they should do and are not ending up in the wrong hands. I want to turn to trafficking and brokering arms. I know that in the EU Presidency, the German Presidency, there was an initiative to perhaps examine this area, to have some control and oversight. I wondered if that was being pursued in any way and has it really made the progress that we hoped it would?
  (Mr Cook) It is certainly being pursued. Britain is one of only two countries which has ever responded to it by providing comment. Within our own national competence we have included proposals within the White Paper of the DTI and in the light of responses we may take forward action on that when legislation is taken on the basis of the White Paper. On the issue of brokering and trafficking, I think that there is a bona fide issue here of concern. It is not large in terms of the total volume or the total value of the arms trade. By and large people do not broker the sale of a ship or an aircraft from a third country. It can be quite significant in some of the more dubious supplies of small arms. This is a separate area of real concern. My speech to the Security Council in New York in September was specifically on the threat of small arms and the threat they provide. I think there is something very misleading about the very term "small arms". Small arms have been the basic method of mass killing over the past decade. There are probably some three million killed in conflicts by small arms. We do need first of all to reduce the volume of small arms in areas like West Africa and to reduce the trade in small arms, particularly focusing on removing the illicit trade in small arms. We are working on better marking of firearms. There is a draft United Nations protocol that requires the marking of all firearms at the time of production so that they can be traced. Also we are looking at the possibility of restrictions which would make sure that small arms can only be sold to state agencies, not to non-state actors, people who might support rebel groups and whatever. I think if we take that forward vigorously we may actually address some of the concerns that brokering and trafficking give rise to. Parallel measures to tighter control of brokering could make a useful contribution.

  Laura Moffatt: That is heartening to hear but still there was no mention in the Annual Report of the EU Code of Conduct. Is there anything that we can do?


 
previous page contents next page

House of Commons home page Parliament home page House of Lords home page search page enquiries

© Parliamentary copyright 1999
Prepared 20 December 1999