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Arms Trade: Saudi Arabia

Question for Department for International Trade

UIN 86598, tabled on 8 September 2020

To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, pursuant to the Answer of 1 September 2020 to Question 78567 and grouped questions, whether the 27 September 2015 air-strike on a residential area in Midi was (a) among the 300 incidents analysed by her Department to consider whether or not it constituted a possible breach of international humanitarian law, and (b) one of the small number of incidents assessed to be a possible violation of international humanitarian law.

Answered on

11 September 2020

The International Humanitarian Law Analysis was applied to 310 incidents. As at 30th April 2020, there were 528 allegations entered on the MOD Tracker, of which 19 were assessed to be duplicates. A further 166 were assessed to be “not credible”, which means the information and intelligence available indicates that the alleged events were not likely to have happened or were not likely to have involved fixed-wing aircraft operated by the Saudi-led Coalition. In addition, 33 allegations were awaiting assessment.

Our analysis as to whether or not an incident constituted a ‘possible’ breach of international humanitarian law used all available sources of information, including some that are necessarily confidential and sensitive. As a result, we are not able to provide details of individual assessments for national security reasons.

We have assessed that there were a small number of incidents that were ‘possible’ violations, which have been treated for the purposes of this analysis as violations of international humanitarian law.