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When we put this to the Foreign Office, a spokeswoman told us that “the UK’s priority was to secure cross-regional agreement on a text that strengthens human rights in Yemen as we urge all parties to find a solution to the crisis.”
The then-British foreign secretary Philip Hammond (who last month became Chancellor of the Exchequer in the wake of the Brexit vote) has repeatedly refused to accept that the Saudis have done anything wrong.
In November 2015 he told parliament that “
there is no evidence that IHL [international humanitarian law] has been breached.” The following February the foreign secretary went further still, stating that Britain had “
assessed that there has not been a breach of IHL by the coalition,” an assertion which he repeated on three separate occasions.
Elwood has taken the defence of Saudi Arabia a stage further than Philip Hammond by claiming that the “media-savvy” Houthis may have fabricated evidence of Saudi air strikes.
He suggested to MPs that the Houthis “
who are very media-savvy in such a situation, are using their own artillery pieces deliberately, targeting individual areas where the people are not loyal to them, to give the impression that there have been air attacks.”
Like Hammond, Elwood has claimed that Britain conducted its own assessment into breaches of IHL. However, the Foreign Office now claims that that these systematic misrepresentations were “mistakes”.
This assertion does not ring true.
The Foreign Office is famed for precision in its reporting and does not have a record of making “mistakes” of this kind. Bear in mind that false statements were not made once, but repeated on numerous occasions.
Britain has been protecting Saudi Arabia and its allies as it fights a murderous and illegal war in Yemen. Saudi is a longstanding British ally, a vital buyer of British arms and key producer of oil.
So there is every reason to assume that Britain has a strong reason to ignore or to underplay evidence that the Saudi-led coalition has been in breach of IHL, which gives very strong protections to civilians caught up in fighting, and bans the targeting of civilian institutions like schools and hospitals.
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