Alghadeer TV Alghadeer TV
Britain is providing more than a dozen repressive regimes around the world with wiretaps, spyware and other telecommunications interception equipment likely to be used to spy on dissidents, according to public records.
The rules are quite clear on this. The UK should not export security goods to countries that might use them for internal repression. However, ministers have quietly signed off more than £75 million in such exports over the past five years to states rated “not free” by the NGO Freedom House.
Recipient countries, 17 in all, including Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, as well as the United Arab Emirates, which was the biggest recipient of licenses totaling £11.5 million alone since 2015.
The UK has been accused of systematically failing to conduct proper checks on who it sold arms to, while Labour called on the government to show it is working to prove that it is complying with its own rules against arming dictators.
The UK has also exported such goods to other states that are not officially rated “not free” but where supplying spyware could cause concern.
Hong Kong, while repressing protests, had a £2 million shipment approved last year, and the Philippines, where police extrajudicial killings are rampant, has also provided steady business for British firms peddling surveillance systems.
Labour’s Shadow International Trade Secretary Emily Thornberry told The Independent, “The government has a legal and moral duty to ensure exports from Britain are not used by other countries for the purposes of internal repression, and that risk should clearly be at the forefront of their mind when those countries have a track record of harassing political opponents and undermining democratic freedoms, and when the equipment concerned is ripe to be abused in that way.
“The government needs to show urgently how those risks were assessed in these cases, and how this equipment was ultimately used.”
A government spokesperson said, “The government takes its export responsibilities seriously and assesses all export licenses in accordance with strict licensing criteria. We will not issue any export licenses where to do so would be inconsistent with these criteria.”
