Emily Thornberry plans ‘Robin Cook Act’ to stop arms sales to states abusing rights

Reform: Emily Thornberry says independent experts should control arms exports, not politicians
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Labour leadership candidate Emily Thornberry today said she would remove decisions about arms exports from politicians.

The shadow foreign secretary said she would put the process of awarding arms export licences into the hands of an independent panel of experts.

The Islington South and Finsbury MP said she wanted to follow the model of Gordon Brown in 1997 when he made the Bank of England independent and gave it full control of interest rates.

She said she would call it the “Robin Cook Act” after the late former foreign secretary who resigned over the Iraq war in 2003.

Emily Thornberry (centre) at Labour leadership husting 
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Writing for website Labour List, she said: “You can’t play favourites when it comes to countries who are abusing human rights or breaching international law.

"As Robin himself said in 1999: we must never ‘turn a blind eye to how other governments behave, and a deaf ear to the cries for help of their people’.”

The Standard understands that Ms Thornberry wanted to set out this policy at the party’s 2017 conference but could only get a “watered down” version past the leader’s office.

Last June the Court of Appeal ruled that British arms sales to Saudi Arabia — which is engaged in the war in Yemen — were unlawful.

Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton said the Government “made no concluded assessments of whether the Saudi-led coalition had committed violations of international humanitarian law in the past, during the Yemen conflict, and made no attempt to do so”.

Ms Thornberry proposes that experts would be interviewed and appointed not by ministers, but by the cross-party Commons Committees on Arms Export Controls, made up of members of four other select committees, and required to explain publicly their decisions every month.

She said she would aim for “permanent reform” of the arms export regime, and would introduce a War Powers Act that would allow Parliament to hold the Government to account before voting on any intervention.

She said: “You should never embark on a military intervention unless you’re clear about the mission, the exit strategy, what will happen in the aftermath, and have clear international backing for your actions.”

Time is running out for the MP who needs a total of 33 nominations from local parties to make the ballot paper. Ms Thornberry has just 18 and nominations close at the end of the week.

Her rivals have secured their spots on the ballot through union or local group backing, with Sir Keir Starmer on 280, Rebecca Long-Bailey on 131 and Lisa Nandy on 56.

Sir Keir suspended campaigning over the weekend because his wife’s mother was in intensive care in St Mary’s Hospital in west London. She died in hospital on Saturday.

It comes as the Labour Party formally reported members of Sir Keir’s team to the Information Commissioner, accusing them of hacking into the party’s membership database.

Sir Keir and his team said the claims were “utter nonsense”, while Labour MP David Lammy told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “It didn’t happen.”

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