Oxfam: UK has hidden arms trade
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Straw agreed to amend controls on component sales, report said.
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LONDON, England (CNN) -- Leading aid and human rights groups have accused the UK government of exploiting a "dangerous loophole," leading to a rise in some areas of arms sales.
The accusation was made Wednesday, hours before British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw was due to appear before a parliamentary committee on arms export controls.
The report, released jointly by the charity Oxfam, Amnesty International and the International Action Network on Small Arms, said the UK applied weaker controls to the export of key components of weapons, including bomb-making equipment and guidance systems.
These double standards, according to the report, mean arms components can be sold and reassembled in places where human rights abuses are common.
The report said parts made in the UK were reaching countries like Zimbabwe, Israel, Indonesia, Uganda, Colombia, Nepal and the Philippines, despite a ban on the sale of complete weapons systems to those countries.
"We are concerned that weaker standards of licensing of these items... create a dangerous new loophole that will allow UK-provided arms components to contribute to suffering around the world," it said.
The Foreign Office dismissed the accusations as unfounded. It added that the UK government would refuse to issue a license to sell arms components if there was an unacceptable risk of them being misused or resold elsewhere.
But Oxfam said that was exactly what was happening, due to a relaxation on export controls to avoid international arms embargoes. It said there had been an 11-fold increase under Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour government in the number of licenses granted for components – from 1,600 in 1998 to 18,948 in 2002.
Labour came to power in 1997 promising to pursue an "ethical foreign policy" but critics have said that pledge often conflicts with ministers' desire to protect jobs in the UK arms industry.
The report cited one case that occurred in 2002 when Straw relaxed controls on component sales so British-made parts could be used in American F-16 fighter jets being sold to Israel.
Britain had previously banned the sale of military equipment to Israel that could be used against Palestinians but Oxfam said Straw wanted to protect an arms deal between U.S. and British defense contractors.
Oxfam said Britain was far from being alone in selling arms components to countries that abused human rights, and said a world arms trade treaty, similar to a ban on the sale of land mines, was needed to tackle the problem.
"We're not against the sale of arms per se ... but arms being in the wrong hands and misused and causing mass suffering in places like Africa," policy director Justin Forsyth told CNN.
"There are countries in central Africa where we wouldn't sell machine guns, but we'd sell parts of machine guns," Forsyth told CNN. "There's an EU embargo on selling weapons (in central Africa) but the British government continues to sell components. The government is being economical with the truth ... this is unacceptable."
"Those components can easily be assembled there to make machine gun. There is no difference between selling a machine gun and the parts."
