LONDON: Britain broke the law by allowing arms sales to Saudi Arabia that might have been deployed in the war in Yemen, an English court ruled on Thursday after activists said there was evidence the weapons had been used in violation of human rights statutes.

While the court’s decision does not mean Britain must immediately halt arms exports to Saudi Arabia, it does mean that there is a stay on the granting of new export licences to sell arms to the kingdom — Britain’s biggest weapons purchaser.

The United Nations has described the conflict in Yemen, which has killed tens of thousands of people including thousands of civilians, as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

“The Court of Appeal has concluded that the process of decision-making by the government was wrong in law in one significant respect,” said Terence Etherton, England’s second most senior judge. Handing down the ruling, Etherton said the government made “no concluded assessments of whether the Saudi-led coalition had committed violations of international humanitarian law in the past, during the Yemen conflict”.

International Trade Minister Liam Fox said he disagreed with the judgment and would seek permission to appeal. “Alongside this we are carefully considering the implications of the judgement for decision making,” Fox said. “While we do this we will not grant any new licences for export to Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners which might be used in the conflict in Yemen.”

Britain is the world’s sixth largest seller of arms, after the United States, Russia, France, Germany and China, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

A senior US State Department official declined to comment on the court ruling, but said both the United States and Britain had long-standing, deeply rooted security ties to Saudi Arabia, despite what he called certain “difficult situations”. “They are carrying a significant amount of equity to protect US interests and US persons, and it is incumbent upon us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our partners, especially when they are on the front line for our interests,” he said.

Saudi Arabia accounted for 43 per cent of Britain’s global arms sales in the past decade.

The legal action against the British government was brought by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade, which wants to end the global arms trade and argued that British weapons were likely to have been used in Yemen in violation of human rights law.

Saudi Arabia’s minister of state for foreign affairs, Adel al-Jubeir, said Iran would be the only beneficiary of cutting off arms exports to the kingdom or its regional allies. “The coalition is fighting a legitimate war at the behest of a legitimate government to stop Iran and its proxies from taking over a strategically important country — so the only beneficiary of a cut-off of weapons to the coalition is going to be Iran,” Jubeir told reporters in London.

Published in Dawn, June 21st, 2019