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| Prince Khalid bin Faisal bin Abdulaziz welcomes David Cameron as he arrives in Jeddah in 2012 to push for more arms sales. |
Government departments are intensifying efforts to win lucrative public contracts in Saudi Arabia, despite a growing human rights row that led the ministry of justice to pull out of a £6m prison contract in the kingdom last week.
Documents seen by the Observer show the government identifying Saudi Arabia as a “priority market” and encouraging UK businesses to bid for contracts in health, security, defence and justice.
“It’s becoming increasingly clear that ministers are bent on ever-closer ties with the world’s most notorious human rights abusers,” said Maya Foa, director of Reprieve’s death penalty team. “Ministers must urgently come clean about the true extent of our agreements with Saudi Arabia and other repressive regimes.”
The UK’s increasingly close relationship with Saudi Arabia – which observes sharia law, under which capital and corporal punishment are common – is under scrutiny because of the imminent beheading of two young Saudis. Ali al-Nimr and Dawoud al-Marhoon were both 17 when they were arrested at protests in 2012 and tortured into confessions, their lawyers say. France, Germany, the US and the UK have raised concerns about the sentences but this has not stopped Whitehall officials from quietly promoting UK interests in the kingdom – while refusing to make public the human rights concerns they have to consider before approving more controversial business deals there. Several of the most important Saudi contracts were concluded under the obscurely named Overseas Security and Justice Assistance (OSJA) policy, which is meant to ensure that the UK’s security and justice activities are “consistent with a foreign policy based on British values, including human rights”. Foreign Office lawyers have gone to court to prevent the policy being made public. Read on and comment » | Jamie Doward | Saturday, October 17, 2015
