CAAT: UK military support for Saudi Arabia risks enabling further atrocities

Dear friends,

Our government continues to side with the global arms trade, choosing weapons exports and killing over peace and security for the majority of the world. In the three months following Saudi Arabia bombing Yemen in January 2026, the UK approved £465 million worth of arms export licences to Saudi Arabia.

These UK weapons exports laid the groundwork for the horrors that would continue, as now our government has committed to so-called “defensive” military support for Saudi Arabia as it intensifies its strikes on Yemen.

Our government is evidently making the same catastrophic failures it made during Saudi Arabia’s devastating seven year war on Yemen, from 2015 to 2022, during which £7.1 billion worth of arms sales from the UK were licensed to Saudi Arabia. Almost four hundred thousand Yemeni people died as a result, from direct military action and from hunger and disease during the resultant humanitarian crisis.

It is more urgent than ever for the movement against the global arms trade to join the call for a complete two-way arms embargo on Saudi Arabia, and for the immediate end to UK military support for Saudi Arabia.

Thank you as well to all who joined us yesterday evening to launch “Dead Letter: How the UK government’s arms export policies have eviscerated International Humanitarian Law”. This report details the history of successive UK government manoeuvres to avoid obligations under both domestic arms export licensing criteria and international law, analysing the role of UK arms exports in Saudia Arabia’s war on Yemen and Israel’s genocide of Gaza. It illustrates how UK arms licensing procedures function to reach a pre-determined conclusion – that the arms sales must continue. 

At the heart of CAAT’s campaign for the UK to stop arming Saudi Arabia are the people of Yemen, who faced untold suffering at the hands of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition’s bombing, during which UK weapons exports played an instrumental role. CAAT, in partnership with Transition Security Project has recently released “Reparations for Yemen: A proposal for a windfall tax on British arms companies that enabled Saudi war crimes”.

This report calls on the UK government and the arms companies who profited enormously from the Saudi coalition’s bombing campaign to pay reparations to the people of Yemen. These reparations must be raised via a windfall tax on those complicit British arms companies, to be matched by our government through restoring its overseas aid budget.

CAAT could not do this work without your support, and as always we thank you for your committed efforts – whether you can join us in the streets, share our posts on social media, amplify our petitions, organise events with CAAT, lobby your MP and council or protest at arms companies directly. You can find the nearest company arming Israel to you here. Your donations, if you are in a financial position to be able to consider this, are hugely appreciated as well.

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Thank you for your continued support in resisting the deadly arms trade,

Zoe and everyone at Campaign Against Arms Trade