Summary
Since 1999, the Defence, Foreign Affairs, International Development and Trade and Industry Committees have worked together to scrutinise how the Government regulates the export of military equipment. We focus in this inquiry on a number of issues including specific licensing decisions taken during 2001.
For the most part the Government has interpreted the criteria against which it assesses licence applications fairly, appropriately and consistently. We look closely, however, at:
- how stringently the Government judges whether proposed exports of conventional weapons to India and Pakistan are likely to impact on regional stability,
- how committed it is to implementing its ban on torture equipment, and
- the export of small arms to countries which the Government rightly supports in their attempts to preserve law and order, but which have flawed human rights records.
We continue to press for a more consistent policy on monitoring how defence exports are used after they have been delivered, while recognising that this is no substitute for considering export applications as fully as possible before deciding whether to allow them to take place.
The Government's announcement of additional policy criteria for the export of components in multilateral manufacturing projects recognises that defence manufacturing is an increasingly international business. We commend the Government for tackling this issue, and for being open about doing so, but we still have a number of doubts about the implications of the Government's chosen solution, which we explore in detail.
We investigate the implications of the Government's involvement in both the promotion and the regulation of defence sales by British industry, and we suggest how transparency could be improved when military equipment is sold or given away by the Government. In this area, as in a number of others, there is room for further openness in the Government's Annual Reports on Strategic Export Controls, although we acknowledge that they remain among the most informative in the world.
We look again at the administration of the Government's licensing system. Although the performance of the Export Control Organisation appears slowly to be improving, the system overall remains below an acceptable standard. We also question whether the Government's information systems are adequate to permit full and accurate knowledge of previous licensing decisions. Information is crucial to our scrutiny of Government. We investigate several cases in which the information provided to us and to the House of Commons has been delayed or inaccurate. Our scrutiny of the Government continues to evolve, within the constraints of the information that the Government allows us to see.
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