(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - The London-based human rights group Amnesty International is pushing the British Prime Minister David Cameron to harness London’s “deadly” arms trade.Amnesty International said Britain has been one of the arms suppliers to dictators around the world in the knowledge that they were committing “atrocities”, though the group did not refer to the fact that the British government itself continues to arm despots.The human rights campaign group said Cameron should use the world leaders’ July summit to discuss the first ever Arms Trade Treaty to commit his own and other governments to prevent such deadly trade.“No one knows for sure how many hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Iraq under [Iraq’s toppled dictator] Saddam... But we do know that at least some of the weapons used to do the killing came from companies based in the UK and USA. The weapons were sold to him even though it was known he was committing such atrocities,” Amnesty said.“World leaders meet in July to draw up the first ever treaty aimed at controlling this deadly trade. With your help, the Arms Trade Treaty can help save thousands of lives. But it will only succeed if it makes clear that arms shall not be transferred where there is serious risk that they will be used to commit human rights abuses and atrocities as well as fuel poverty,” it added.The group has launched an online petition to urge the Prime Minister “not to compromise on human rights.”The British government pledged back in February 2011 to revoke all munitions export licenses to several Middle Eastern and North African countries, including Bahrain, but the promises were nothing more than a bunch of liesThe BBC revealed in an October 29 report that year that Britain has been planning to sell more weapons to ‘authoritarian regimes in the Middle East” such as Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.“Throughout the first two quarters of this year, even as tensions in the region reached boiling point, arms sales were approved by the British government to Algeria, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen,” the report said.This is while other reports disclosed in September that Britain sold millions of pounds of arms used for internal repression to dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa including Libya, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia in the previous months. /129
source :
Friday
20 April 2012
7:30:00 PM
310117
The London-based human rights group Amnesty International is pushing the British Prime Minister David Cameron to harness London’s “deadly” arms trade.