New Clause 1 - End-use monitoring
Export Control Bill
10:15 am
Ms Vera Baird (Redcar, Labour)
I invite the Minister to consider the practicality of introducing a clear system for end-use certification and monitoring of exports in the Bill. Some of the huge concerns on the subject have been made clear and have reached the most far-flung regions of our debate.
I welcome the fact that the Government have made it clear that they are further considering the possibilities of arms being diverted to undesirable users when licensing applications are assessed, and that the Government have put in place additional procedures to avert that problem. However, the Government will not be convincingly sure whether end-user undertakings have been broken without post-export checks and if they continue to rely on guarantees of self-evidently variable quality. An explicit reference to end-use monitoring in the Bill would not only enormously strengthen its purpose, but send a clear signal that the problems associated with end use were taken seriously.
I suspect that the Government might say that end use is monitored through some informal and ad hoc mechanisms, including reports from NGOs and the media. Perhaps those mechanisms obviate the need for more than is currently available, but I suggest that an effective end-use control system must be based primarily on monitoring by the Government, with NGOs fulfilling a complementary role.
I do not want to get hopelessly bogged down on the subject of Hawk jets and Indonesia, but it is an important, germane and accurate example of a situation in which much information was readily available, not to the present Government, but to the previous Conservative Government. Either they were unaware, I say charitably, of the information about the use of Hawk jets in East Timor, or they rejected or ignored it. The information came from diverse sources.
I feel that I should briefly rehearse what was said in July 1996 when the information, which had been in the public domain for some time, began to take the form of evidence in court proceedings at a trial held on the topic in the north of England. Jose Ramos Horta, now a Nobel laureate and then the Foreign Secretary in exile of East Timor, testified that many documents were available from the Roman Catholic Church in East Timor, with which he was in frequent contact, stating that British-built Hawks supplied under British Aerospace's first contract with Indonesia had often been involved in air attacks against the East Timorese.
The journalist John Pilger gave evidence that he had clandestinely entered East Timor in 1993 and had not only seen Hawk jets on many instances, but grown to appreciate the local population's familiarity with the sound that they made as they attacked. Professor Paul Rogers from the department of peace studies at the university of Bradford testified on a point similar to that made a moment ago about range. He made it clear that the first batch of four aeroplanes sent by British Aerospace under its second contract with the Indonesian Government went to the Bandung squadron, which was well in range of and spearheaded the airborne attacks against what was described as counter insurgence in East Timor.