Senior British officials ignored legal advice that the UK government should no longer authorise the sale of arms to Saudi Arabia during its war in Yemen, a former Foreign Official has said.
Writing in The Guardian, Mark Smith said that during the war, there was a high-level meeting of senior Foreign Office officials, including legal advisers, in which it was “acknowledged that the UK had exceeded the threshold for halting arms sales”.
“Yet instead of advising ministers to suspend exports, the focus shifted to finding ways to ‘get back on the right side of the law’,” Smith wrote.
Smith, who was a lead adviser on arms sales policy and tasked with gathering information to inform advisers on whether sales were lawful, said the UK government was “fully aware that Saudi air strikes were causing massive civilian causalities”.
Under the UK’s legal framework, arms sales must cease if there is a clear risk that weapons could be used to commit serious violations of international law.
New MEE newsletter: Jerusalem Dispatch
Sign up to get the latest insights and analysis on
Israel-Palestine, alongside Turkey Unpacked and other MEE newsletters
Smith said he repeatedly raised his concerns at the time “only to be overruled”, and that another colleague resigned over the issue. “I soon followed,” he wrote.
The Foreign Office did not respond immediately to a request for comment on Monday regarding Smith’s specific observations about UK arms sales during the Yemen war.
Smith made headlines in August when he resigned a second time from the Foreign Office, this time in protest over continued UK arms sales to Israel, nearly a year into Israel’s war on Gaza.
“It is with sadness that I resign after a long career in the diplomatic service, however I can no longer carry out my duties in the knowledge that this Department may be complicit in war crimes,” he wrote in a resignation letter.
“I have raised this at every level in the organisation, including through an official whistle blowing investigation and received nothing more than ‘thank you we have noted your concern’.”
But on Sunday, he shed more light on the difficulties he faced both during the Yemen and Gaza wars to have his advice heard and acted upon by senior government officials.
Smith said he witnessed senior officials “under intense pressure from ministers to skew” legal assessments.
“Reports were repeatedly returned to me with instructions to ‘rebalance’ the findings – to downplay evidence of civilian harm and emphasise diplomatic efforts, regardless of the facts,” he wrote in the Guardian.
“I was often summoned for verbal instructions – a tactic deliberately employed to avoid creating a written record that could be subject to freedom of information requests or legal scrutiny,” he added.
“The British public deserves to know how these decisions are made behind closed doors – and how systemic dysfunction enables the government to perpetuate harm while shielding itself from scrutiny.”
