Arms Trade and Human Rights

The Netherlands are the 9th biggest arms exporter in the world. The Netherlands issues arms export licenses worth around 1 billion euro’s annually, some destined for conflict areas or areas with a problematic human rights situation. As such, weapons have been exported from the Netherlands to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Pakistan in the past.

Every large export has to be licensed by the government in a separate procedure. The EU and UN have devised rules for this procedure. It should in theory take into account conflict situations and human rights violations, but the question is whether that always happens in practice.

The Public Interest Litigation Project (PILP) of the NJCM together with Stop Wapenhandel [Stop Arms Trade] wants to research judicial possibilities to prevent arms exports to notorious and human rights violating countries.

Please click here for our call for research on this topic.

 

Arms export studies by students

The PILP is pleased to see that a number of students have enthusiastically reacted to our call for researches on the subject of arms exports and the human rights framework. They have analysed the legal framework of arms export on a national level, national-European level, on the level of the European Union and on a public international scale. In general, the question was: To what kind of human rights based test do states evaluate with the granting of permission for arms export by arms trade companies and what kind of test should they be assessing?

Here you can read the research done by Claudia Wenker on Dutch law and weapon export. Saskia Bril illustrates what we can learn from previous Dutch cases concerning arms export and human rights in her essay. The third study by Emma Bree discusses the cases Mother of Srebrenica v. The Netherlands and Shell/Nigeria in light of liability of the state and companies. How European rules are applied in Dutch law is analysed by Lydia de Leeuw and can be read here. Bianca Hettinga has examined how other EU Member States apply and adhere to the human rights criterion preserved in the Common Position in her research. The Public International Law and Policy Group has provided us with two independent researches. The first one analyses the judicial instruments that are relevant for regulating the export of arms by Belgium, France, the United Kingdom and the United States. Their second research focuses on the UN Arms Trade Treaty. Finally, Lingxi Zhong explored the possibilities to which states can be held liable under international law when they export arms to countries that are known for violating human rights on a notorious basis.

These researches are written by individual students for the PILP. However, the PILP does not necessarily agree to all the ideas and conclusions made in the researches.

 

 

Updates:

• On April 9 2015, ten students, including a team from the PILPG, met with representatives of Stop Wapenhandel [Stop Arms Trade] and the PILP. Ten subtopics were identified during this meeting and the students will conduct research into these issues in the coming months. The results of this research will be published on the website of the PILP. Based on these results, the possibilities of legal action will be explored.
• At the beginning of August 2015, all the research reports were received. Please click here for the press release. A summary of this research as well as the main findings can be accessed here.