Amnesty: arms manufacturers complicit in human rights violations
(B2) Amnesty International, one of the leading NGOs in advocacy against arms sales, is releasing a new report on the subject on Monday (9 September). The association interviewed manufacturers directly to understand how they take human rights issues into account in their commercial activity.
Lack of transparency
Of the 22 global giants surveyed, in the United States, Europe, China, Russia, Israel and Brazil, only eight agreed to answer: Airbus, BAE Systems, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Rolls-Royce, Saab and Thales. And again, the answers, published in the appendix to the report, are overwhelmingly written by communicators and to say the least laconic.
Disclaimer
The main conclusion of the study relates to the lack of accountability of manufacturers. They all believe that it is up to the States to take the decision whether or not to export and whether or not to suspend deliveries or the provision of services. An argument which has its limits: if it is the States which give the export authorizations, the industrialists are at the initiative of the requests.
A vague ethics
The manufacturers who responded to Amnesty insist on their ethical commitments. The NGO notes, however, that despite this facade of speech, no one was able to provide concrete examples of ethical decisions. She cites the pharmaceutical industry as an example: several companies in this sector have chosen to take a public position against the use of their substances in executions in the United States, China, Vietnam or Thailand, and, when in doubt, to give up sales. The idea would be for Nexter or Airbus to speak out publicly to regret the worrying uses of their weapons in Yemen, for example.
Complicity
For the NGO, manufacturers are " accomplices of the human rights violations perpetrated by the weapons they sold. Amnesty recalls that several international texts of UN as well as OECD commit multinationals to ensure that they do not infringe the most basic rights. However, the NGO has never followed up its accusations of illegality, in the context of arms sales, with effective legal proceedings.
(RM)
