The Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) filed a case in the UK High Court on Tuesday, alleging that arms exports contributed to the deaths of thousands of civilians.
The UK-based group is challenging the legality of the British government’s decision in 2020 to continue supplying weapons to the Saudi-led coalition involved in Yemen’s nine-year conflict.
It is the most recent development in a long-running legal battle over the legality of the exports, which CAAT claims have cost the UK more than 23 billion pounds ($28 billion) since the war began.
CAAT won a similar battle in 2019, when Court of Appeal judges ruled that continuing to licence military equipment that could be used in Yemen’s war for export was illegal, citing concerns that it could be used to commit war crimes.
Following the ruling, the government temporarily halted sales. UK law prohibits the export of weapons if there is a “clear risk” that they will be used to commit war crimes.
However, after a governmental review, exports resumed in mid-2020 by order of then-trade minister Liz Truss.
The review concluded that possible violations of international humanitarian law by actors using UK-supplied weapons were only “isolated incidents”.
British arms sales to Saudi Arabia have continued in recent years, despite the United States’ partial ban on weapons exports to the kingdom as a result of the Yemen war.
Meanwhile, campaigners and rights groups have questioned the findings of the government review.
“The abundant evidence of laws of war violations by the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen throughout the war shows that these violations are not simply ‘isolated incidents,’ as the UK government claims,” said Niku Jafarnia, Yemen and Bahrain researcher at Human Rights Watch.
Civilian casualties nearly doubled in the four months following the renewal’s rejection, according to data from the Civilian Impact Monitoring Project.
“The evidence is clear that Yemeni civilians have died and continue to die as a result of weapons sales authorised by the UK government,” Jafarnia stated. At a time when the United Kingdom is promoting a rules-based international order and rightly condemning Russia for serious violations of international law, it must apply those same rules to itself and stop selling weapons to Saudi Arabia.
