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Campagne tegen Wapenhandel
To: The Swedish Government
From: The Dutch Campaign Against Arms Trade
Concerns: Review of Swedish arms export policy
Groningen, 18 April 2005
Dear Madam, Sir,
www.stopwapen
handel.org
As we understand that you currently revise your arms export policy, we would
like to use the opportunity to mention a few points.
As we have been informed, the KRUT inquiry report that was made on your
instigation unfortunately fails to strengthen current export control policies, and
instead seems to point to the very opposite direction of a more exportoriented
approach. We strongly believe that arms export control should be
guided by ethical, international policy considerations, never by defence industrial
policy or foreign trade considerations.
Also, as we understand, you are advised to weaken human rights related provisions
to just the possible use of the item in question for human rights violations,
rather than the banning of arms exports to human rights violators in general,
as would seem to be more common sense to us.
Finally, we regret that KRUT has not included democracy-related recommendations.
To us it would seem logical to apply such a criterion, as is generally accepted
practice in maintaining relations with developing countries. Moreover,
befriended dictatorships and one party states often tend to be less stable and
can therefore easily turn into an enemy or be overthrown by less friendly new
rulers .
As strong supporters of a really restrictive European arms export policy we
kindly ask you to reconsider the KRUT report and strongly advice you to make
sure that factors such as basic human rights, democracy and regional stability
are properly addressed in any revision of your export policies.
yours sincerely,
Frank Slijper,
on behalf of the Dutch Campaign Against Arms Trade
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