R (oao Campaign Against Arms Trade) v Secretary of State for International Trade [2023] EWHC 1343 (Admin)
The Divisional Court (Popplewell LJ and Henshaw J) has dismissed a second challenge by Campaign Against Arms Trade (“CAAT”) to the Secretary of State’s decision to continue granting licences for the export of arms to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for use in the conflict in Yemen.
CAAT claimed that there was a clear risk that materiel, exported by the UK to Saudi Arabia, might be used in the commission of a serious violation of International Humanitarian Law (“IHL”) and that the Secretary of State was therefore required to cease granting export licences.
A similar challenge to the lawfulness of a previous decision of the Secretary of State had been dismissed by the Divisional Court in R (oao Campaign Against Arms Trade) v Secretary of State for International Trade [2017] EWHC 1754 (Admin). However, the Court of Appeal ([2019] EWCA Civ 1020) had allowed an appeal on the sole ground that in reaching her decision the Secretary of State should have attempted to assess the extent to which past incidents of concern involved a breach of IHL. The Secretary of State incorporated such an assessment in re-taking her decision in July 2020. In this second challenge, CAAT contended that the Secretary of State had acted irrationally in failing to identify the extent of past breaches of IHL by Saudi Arabia and in concluding that there was no pattern to past breaches.
The Divisional Court has rejected CAAT’s challenge, concluding that it could not be said that the categorisation of any of the incidents of concern was irrational and neither was there any basis for treating the Secretary of State’s approach to identifying patterns amongst those incidents as irrational.
The judgment is available to view here.
Jessica Wells appeared for the Secretary of State, led by Sir James Eadie KC and Jonathan Glasson KC, instructed by the Government Legal Department.
