UK government ignored advice to stop selling arms to Saudi Arabia, says ex-official

Senior British officials ignored legal advice that the UK government should no longer authorise the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia during its war in Yemen, a former Foreign Official has said.

Writing in The Guardian, Mark Smith said that during the war, there was a high-level meeting of senior Foreign Office officials, including legal advisers, in which it was “acknowledged that the UK had exceeded the threshold for halting arms sales”.

“Yet instead of advising ministers to suspend exports, the focus shifted to finding ways to ‘get back on the right side of the law’,” Smith wrote.

Smith, who was a lead adviser on arms sales policy and tasked with gathering information to inform advisers on whether sales were lawful, said the UK government was “fully aware that Saudi air strikes were causing massive civilian causalities”.

Under the UK’s legal framework, arms sales must cease if there is a clear risk that weapons could be used to commit serious violations of international law.

Smith said he repeatedly raised his concerns at the time “only to be overruled”, and that another colleague resigned over the issue.

“I soon followed,” he wrote, although it was not immediately clear if Smith had resigned or left his role for another position in the civil service.

Smith made headlines in August when he resigned from the Foreign Office in protest over continued UK arms sales to Israel, nearly a year into Israel’s war on Gaza.

“It is with sadness that I resign after a long career in the diplomatic service, however I can no longer carry out my duties in the knowledge that this Department may be complicit in war crimes,” he wrote in a resignation letter.

“I have raised this at every level in the organisation, including through an official whistle blowing investigation and received nothing more than ‘thank you we have noted your concern'."

'Under intense pressure'

But on Sunday, he shed more light on the difficulties he faced both during the Yemen and Gaza wars to have his advice heard and acted upon by senior government officials. 

Smith said he witnessed senior officials “under intense pressure from ministers to skew” legal assessments.

“Reports were repeatedly returned to me with instructions to ‘rebalance’ the findings – to downplay evidence of civilian harm and emphasise diplomatic efforts, regardless of the facts," he wrote in the Guardian.

"I was often summoned for verbal instructions – a tactic deliberately employed to avoid creating a written record that could be subject to freedom of information requests or legal scrutiny," he added.

“The British public deserves to know how these decisions are made behind closed doors – and how systemic dysfunction enables the government to perpetuate harm while shielding itself from scrutiny."

Smith also noted that the UK had been forced to suspend arms sales to Saudi Arabia for a year after losing a judicial review in the High Court, but said that instead of "learning from this failure", the government had changed its arm export licensing criteria to make it harder to challenge its decisions in court.

Katie Fallon, advocacy manager for Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), one of the organisations which brought that legal challenge, said Smith has confirmed "exactly what CAAT has been arguing for decades: the UK's arms export control system is rotten to its core".

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"What Smith’s evidence shows is that the only way for the Foreign Office to keep doing this is to bully staff - UK civil servants and diplomats - into changing their reports, warning them not to leave any written evidence, or even asking them to “delete correspondence” that could be used in legal cases against the government," Fallon said.

Fallon said it was also clear there has been "a systematic effort to manipulate and suppress the truth".

"Thousands of campaigners and activists across the UK have been vindicated, but it's too late for thousands of Yemeni people, it's too late for tens of thousands of Palestinian people who have been murdered with weapons and components exported from the UK," she said.

"This has to be a wake up call and lead to systemic change in our arms export licensing system. How many more civilians does UK military equipment have to kill - how many more hospitals, schools and funerals have to be bombed before this broken system is radically reformed?"

Responding to Smith's comments in the Guardian, a Foreign Office spokesperson said: “These allegations are a misrepresentation of this government. Our export license controls are some of the most robust in the world and are strictly guided by legal advice.

The spokesperson also noted that as soon as Foreign Secretary David Lammy took office last July, he ordered a review into Israel's compliance with international humanitarian law and that the Labour government suspended export licences to Israel for use in military operations on 2 September.

“We are considering the implications of the ceasefire in Gaza for our assessments of Israel’s compliance with international humanitarian law and will keep our export licensing position under review," the spokesperson said.