Arms Trade

Review: “A Nation of Feminist Arms Dealers?”

Posted on: May 10th, 2019 by Ernie Regehr

Canadian military export policies came to unusual public attention following Canada’s 2014 agreement to sell $15 billion worth of armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia. The deal was negotiated under the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and was subsequently given official approval, through the granting of export permits, by the Liberal Government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was elected in 2015. In the debate that ensued, the greater indignation was reserved for the Liberals, who had come to power on the promise of a return to multilateralism and re-engagement with the United Nations—a posture that raised expectations of a renewed exercise of Pearsonian internationalism [rather than of record-breaking arms sales to one of the world’s most egregious violators of global human rights standards.

See Ernie Regehr’s H-Diplo review of: Srdjan Vucetic.  “A Nation of Feminist Arms Dealers?  Canada and Military Exports.”  International Journal 72:4 (2017):  503-519.  

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Cancelling the Saudi Arms Deal

Posted on: December 20th, 2018 by Ernie Regehr

The following letter to the editor appeared in the Globe and Mail of December 20, 2018, written in response to the December 18 op-ed by Bessma Momani of the Balsillie School of International Affairs and the Centre for International Governance Innovation, “Cancelling Canada’s Saudi arms deal would merely be a feel-good measure.”

Canada’s been selling armoured vehicles to the Saudis for almost 30 years, so it’s true that terminating one Canadian contract “will do little to stop the Saudis or alleviate the suffering of Yemenis.” No one has claimed otherwise.

But here are the pertinent questions. Do we want to promote a rules-based international order, and should those rules place restrictions on military sales to regimes engaged in the gross and systematic violation of the rights of their citizens? Should there be restrictions on the sales of weapons to states guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity?

You can buy these items in any size viagra sample india and flavor. Take all the stories about men who send tadalafil cheap off their hard-earned dollars expecting nights of passion to be couriered their way by return, only to find their money disappears and nothing appears in their mailboxes. However, http://abacojet.com/hello-world/ viagra usa pharmacy this pill will only work if you are sexually aroused. Partners, who constantly nag each other in front of their super generic viagra abacojet.com children. Canadian armoured vehicles go to the Saudi National Guard – its key attribute being loyalty to the royal family, and its key mandate being to protect the Saudi royals from dissidents, coup attempts and, ultimately, democracy. So, if you favour principled policies in support of a rules-based international order, should a state drawn to feminist values in its foreign policies be content to send weapons of repression to a state notorious for its systematic subordination of women?

Stopping the war in Yemen is a matter of extraordinary urgency – arms shipments are relevant, though stopping Canadian arms shipments will not be decisive. But a responsible military-export policy has many other objectives and dimensions, and honouring human rights and international humanitarian law should be very near the top.

Ernie Regehr, Waterloo, Ont.

Why debate in Canada over military drone use is sorely needed

Posted on: November 1st, 2017 by Ernie Regehr

Earlier this year, Canada’s chief of defence staff assured Canadians that the Armed Forces won’t be using the armed drones they are bent on acquiring on “Hollywood” style assassination missions.

That is certainly good to know, but it will take more than personal pledges to mitigate concerns about the uses and abuses of armed, remotely piloted aerial vehicles.
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Continue reading at OpenCanada.ca.

Exporting arms

Posted on: August 18th, 2016 by Ernie Regehr

Letter in today’s Globe and Mail in response to the editorial, “Ottawa Comes Clean on Arms Exports” (17 August 2016)

The choices for controlling military exports are not to either “block arms sales to anyone who might actually use them” or “be realistic about weapons sales” (Ottawa Comes Clean On Arms Exports, editorial, Aug. 17). The point of export controls is to block arms sales to anyone with a penchant for using them unlawfully.

As for being “realistic” about weapons sales, should Canada export weapons to any country not specifically defined as an enemy, without any regard for a recipient’s disrespect for the rule of law – for human rights, the laws of war, or the protection of civilians? Is that “maturity”?
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The government’s policy changes flout at least two fundamental principles of responsible military export controls: that military commodities are a special category of goods, the international transfers of which are to be restricted in ways not applicable to most civilian commodities; and that weapons suppliers are culpable if they knowingly ship weapons to customers with a demonstrable inclination to use them unlawfully – for example, against civilians.

Ernie Regehr, Waterloo, Ont.

Time to review Canada’s arms export policy

Posted on: January 31st, 2016 by admin

John Lamb and Ernie Regehr

Having now at least acknowledged that it has the authority, indeed responsibility, to cancel export permits to ship armored combat vehicles to Saudi Arabia under certain conditions, the Government needs to take the next logical step – to review and revamp the military commodities export policy that has been allowing such sales for some three decades.

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A flawed Arms Trade Treaty: Taking courage from a flawed NPT

Posted on: May 1st, 2013 by Ernie Regehr

Elements of the peace and disarmament community are currently engaged in a spirited debate over whether the new Arms Trade Treaty (ATT) is an achievement worth celebrating or a failure that could actually harm arms transfer control efforts in the long run.  The ATT is clearly a compromise-ridden agreement, but did enough survive to make it a good basis for ongoing efforts to bring restraint and accountability into the international arms transfer system?

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Canadian drones and the UN arms embargo on Libya

Posted on: December 13th, 2011 by Ernie Regehr

The sale of a Canadian-built surveillance drone to Libyan rebels last summer may well have been in violation of the UN arms embargo. The Government says it has asked the RCMP to investigate.

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On CIGI’s “Inside the Issues”

Posted on: May 23rd, 2011 by Ernie Regehr

A conversation with David A. Welch, CIGI Chair of Global Security and Interim Director of the Balsillie School of International Affairs, on civil society and peace advocacy.

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Arming Repression? Military Exports to Countries that Violate Human Rights

Posted on: June 15th, 2009 by Ernie Regehr

There is a clear global norm, if not yet enforceable international law, against supplying arms to states engaged in serious and persistent human rights violations. To what extent is it a norm that arms suppliers, including Canada, honor in practice?


The proposed “arms trade treaty” that is now the subject of UN-mandated[i] multilateral negotiations is expected to confirm and reinforce the illegality of supplying arms to countries in which there is a credible risk that those arms will be used to attack civilians and violate the rights of their people. In support of that norm, Canada’s current export guidelines discourage, but do not prohibit, military exports to countries “whose governments have a persistent record of serious violations of the human rights of their citizens, unless it can be demonstrated that there is no reasonable risk that the goods might be used against the civilian population.”[ii]

One way to measure the extent to which Canada follows that principle is to compare its performance with that of the rest of the world (a recent Ploughshares report offers a detailed analysis of Canada’s military export performance).[iii] There is currently not enough transparency in the international arms trade system to reliably monitor particular transfers with a view to assessing their likely contribution to human rights violations, but there are compilations of the overall volume of weapons sold worldwide that make it possible to get a good sense of how much of that total volume goes to countries guilty of serious and persistent human rights violations and to identify the comparative records of various suppliers.

For example, Freedom House, a well-established American non-governmental organization that monitors political rights and civil liberties, publishes an annual global survey. For 2005, the last year for which Canadian military export figures are available, the Freedom House survey ranks 192 countries and defines 89 as “free”, 54 as “partly free”, and the remaining 49 as “not free”.[iv] The latter category correlates strongly with states identified by human rights monitoring groups as among the worst offenders.

By that measure, roughly 25 percent of all states are serious and persistent human rights violators – so, the question is, do arms suppliers avoid arms shipments to such countries as a way of reducing the likelihood that their products will be used for illegal purposes (human rights violations) and thus generally honor the norm against supplying repression?

Canada’s most recent report on military exports covers the three years 2003-2005,[v] and the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) register of international transfers[vi] of major weapons systems provides figures for the global trade during the same period. In the three years 2003-2005 worldwide exports of major weapons went to 131 countries, of which 36 were in the Freedom House “not free” category. So 27 percent of arms recipients in that period were major human rights violators – roughly the same proportion of countries that regularly and seriously violate the rights of their citizens according to the Freedom House measure.

That suggests there was no particular effort by suppliers as a group to avoid sales to such countries. Furthermore, roughly one-third of the volume of major arms transferred in those three years went to human rights violating countries, indicating rather a strong willingness – even a modest preference – to sell to repressive regimes.

The US record, according to the SIPRI figures, is actually better than that of the global supplier group. The US sold major weapons to 60 countries during those three years (2003-2005), of which 10, or 16 percent, were in the “not free” category. At the same time, 20 percent of the total volume of its export, almost $20 billion worth, went to “not free” countries – generally indicating a slight bias against supplying arms to human rights violators.

Canada’s record is both better and worse than the US record. Canadian reporting on arms sales (excluding the United States because Government reporting does not include sales to the US) includes all military commodities, major weapons systems as well as small arms, other military equipment, and parts and subcomponents. With all of these categories included, Canada sold to 72 countries during the same three years, of which 9, or 13 percent, were in the “not free” category, indicating a stronger than average record of avoiding sales to repressive regimes. However, when measuring volume, fully 25 percent of all Canadian exports went to “not free” countries. And since 25 percent of all countries in the world fit that category, the record suggests that Canadian policy does not result in any real avoidance of shipments to repressive regimes.

But that is not quite the full story. Canadian exports are heavily concentrated, so what the figures show is not so much that Canada has a tendency to sell to repressive regimes generally, but that it has a rather strong tendency to sell to Saudi Arabia. The repressive Saudi kingdom – by the Freedom House measure it is among the eight most repressive regimes on the planet – has become a favorite customer of Canadian military commodities, especially light armored vehicles. If sales to Saudi Arabia are removed, the proportion of Canadian military goods going to repressive regimes drops to just over 2 percent (the primary customers being Egypt, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates) – showing a significant inclination to avoid military sales to repressive regimes.

Lloyd Axworthy’s 1996 instruction, as Minister of Foreign Affairs,  that the permit approval process pay more rigorous attention to security issues and to threats of hostilities in recipient countries called for “a strict interpretation of human rights criteria”[vii] in military export permit decisions. That strictness seems to have been generally applied during the period 2003-2005, but it has clearly not produced any reluctance to export armored vehicles to Saudi Arabia.

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As a result, the King and his extended family remain vulnerable to any internal opposition that stands a chance of winning the support of the country’s lavishly funded armed forces. Of course, the Royals have not survived this long by ignoring the obvious. The King has in fact taken care to employ divide and rule tactics to create a splintered military – tactics that have included building up the Saudi Arabia National Guard as a tribal force to protect the Royal family from both internal rebellion and the regular Saudi Army. For more than a decade Canada has been a steady supplier of military commodities to Saudi Arabia, primarily light armored vehicles for that same National Guard.

All of this leads to at least three basic conclusions. First, there is no evidence that global arms suppliers collectively now make a point of avoiding arms sales to countries engaged in serious and persistent human rights violations. Second, as long as Canada sees Saudi Arabia as a legitimate arms customer its record of controlling arms to human rights violators is not much better than that of the rest of the world. Third, since the record of global arms suppliers suggests indifference to repression in recipient countries, an Arms Trade Treaty that tries to put some teeth into a global norm against the supply of arms to human rights violators will have to have clear enforcement mechanisms and compliance standards.[viii]

eregehr@ploughshares.ca

Notes

[i] Resolution A/63/240, voted on December 24, 2008 (http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2008/ga10804.doc.htm).

[ii] Report on Exports of Military Goods From Canada, 2003-2005, (Export Controls Division, Export and Import Controls Bureau, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, 2007) http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/trade/eicb/military/miliexport07-en.asp.

[iii] For a detailed analysis of Canadian military export control performance see this special report from Project Ploughshares: Kenneth Eppsand Kyle Gossen, On the Record: An audit of Canada’s report on Canada’s military exports, 2003-05 (Project Ploughshares. January 2009), http://www.ploughshares.ca/libraries/Control/Audit2003-05MilitaryExports.pdf.

[iv] “Combined Average Ratings – Independent Countries 2005” (http://www.freedomhouse.org/template.cfm?page=193&year=2005).

[v] Report on Exports of Military Goods From Canada, 2003-2005, (Export Controls Division, Export and Import Controls Bureau, Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada, 2007) http://www.dfait-maeci.gc.ca/trade/eicb/military/miliexport07-en.asp.

[vi] SIPRI’s Arms Transfer Database, http://www.sipri.org/research/armaments/transfers, searched for data on years 2003 through 2005.

[vii] “Annual Report on Canada’s Military Goods Exports Tabled in Parliament Today, Press Release No. 205, December 11, 1997, Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (http://w01.international.gc.ca/minpub/PublicationContentOnly.asp?publication_id=376245&Language=E&MODE=CONTENTONLY&Local=False).

[viii] An imperative endorsed by a recent UK House of Commons (Foreign Affairs Committee) Report on nonproliferation: Global Security: Non–Proliferation, Fourth Report of Session 2008–09, 3 June 2009.http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmfaff/222/222.pdf.