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Tuesday,6 July 2021 (YJC) _ MPs say Britain is funding groups that ‘whitewash human rights abuses’ in Gulf states.
The government has been accused of using "secretive" payments to channel public funds to institutions that have “whitewashed human rights abuses” in the Gulf region.
A cross-party group of MPs, including Tory MP and father of the house Peter Bottomley, said government funds had been used to send £53.4m to the six Gulf Cooperation Council states between 2016 and 2020
According to the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Democracy and Human Rights in the Gulf, which drew up the report, the money is going to institutions that are complicit in human rights abuses.
And the MPs accuse the government of making "misleading and deceptive" claims about the way UK funds are being spent in the region.
They say the government has “repeatedly ignored evidence” that beneficiaries of UK funding in the Gulf have been implicated in human rights abuses.
And it is alleged that the government’s mandatory human rights impact assessments are “flawed, improperly applied and entirely absent in some cases".
The warning comes as the UK seeks closer relationships with the Gulf states following Brexit – and amid concerns the pressure to find alternatives to trading with the EU could bush Britain into the hands of states with poor human rights records.
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman, which make up the Gulf Cooperation Council, all have poor human rights records, according to NGOs.
The investigation by the MPs focuses on payments made to these states through the government's Integrated Activity Fund (IAF), which operated between 2016 and 2020, and its successor, the Gulf Strategy Fund (GSF).
Beneficiaries of the funding include the Saudi Arabian National Guard, and the country's Joint Incident Assessment Team, which has been repeatedly criticised by NGO Human Rights Watch for “failing to provide credible, impartial, and transparent investigations into alleged coalition laws-of-war violations".
"UK funding to Saudi Arabia thus supports bodies accused of breaching international law and whitewashing war crimes in Yemen," the MPs say.
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