Arms trade

13 August 2011Feature

http://www.sipri.org/

SIPRI - Stockholm International Peace Research Institute

This site contains online books along with lectures and conferences available (all in PDF format) and a lot of information to wade through. It is worth bearing in mind that this website is mainly aimed at academic research. There are however less monolithic texts on the website in the form of “what's new?” which provides news updates not generally found in the…

13 August 2011Feature

Plans for protest at DSEi this year are large-scale and thorough. Training and skills share provision for activists taking part in the protests is similarly ambitious, with a sizeable collective of NonViolent Direct Action (NVDA) trainers offering a programme of workshops both before and during the event.

This article explains who these trainers are, what we're planning to offer, and why we hope that we'll be making a useful contribution to efforts to Disarm DSEi.

Who are the…

13 August 2011Feature

Street campaigning has become a visual event enabling people to get high media coverage with innovative ideas and actions.

The visual images too often are the police charging in full riot gear or protesters being carried away. Certainly the press in Europe runs these pictures time and time again. Seldom do we see the peaceful side of any protest, it just does not make good copy.

For this reason I suggest to you that the picture we need to generate must therefore be new and…

13 August 2011Feature

In 1948 the UN introduced a new category called Weapons of Mass Destruction: atomic explosives, radioactive material weapons, chemical and biological weapons.

Fact box

Declared nuclear states:

USA (1945)
Soviet Union (1949)
Britain (1952)
France (1960)
China (1964)
India (1998)
Pakistan (1998)

Undecleared:

Israel

Nuclear weapons

Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated the devastation that nuclear weapons cause.…

13 August 2011News

BAE Systems AGM, 9 May. Some shareholders are confused about the legality of their profits. Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) organised a protest outside, and difficult questions inside the AGM. The last question came from South African Andrew Feinstein who resigned as an ANC MP in 2001 when the Pretoria government refused to allow a full investigation into corruption allegations relating to a £5m arms deal involving BAE Systems.

Following their stunning defeat in the British high…

13 August 2011Feature

On the basis of the official invitations from previous DSEi exhibitions, we can say with certainty that representatives from countries engaged in conflict, with poor human rights records and with major development needs will all be in attendance again this year.

Human Rights

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office's annual Human Rights Report for 2005 considers twenty countries in detail, in which it considers that human rights are a particularly serious problem. Six of these; Afghanistan…

13 August 2011Feature

One group has been working with the local community to raise awareness about the arms fair and to keep up the pressure on the organisers.

East London Against the Arms Fair (ELAAF) is a group of people who live in London's Docklands area and have protested against the arms fair since it was first held in the area. One of our aims is to inform local people about what is happening on their doorstep and to encourage their support.

Raising Awareness

To this end we have been…

13 August 2011Feature

CAMPAIGNS

Amnesty International - Website of the AI international secretariat covers arms trading in areas of conflict and regimes linked to human rights violations. http://www.amnesty.org Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) was set up in 1974 by a number of peace and other organisations. It is a broad coalition of groups and individuals in the UK working to end the international arms trade. Contact: 11 Goodwin St, London N4 3HQ, Britain(+44 20 7281 0297; fax 7281 4369; email…

13 August 2011Feature

In 2003, the global arms trade was worth around $40 billion. As in any trade, the deals which make up this figure are facilitated by bringing together potential buyers and sellers. It is this role that is fulfilled by the glossy corporate arms bazaar due to take place in London's ExCel Centre from 13-16 September: Defence Systems and Equipment International (DSEi).

Organised by Spearhead Exhibitions, now a subsidiary of information and education giant Reed Elsevier, DSEi does much to…

13 August 2011Feature

Regardless of the outcome of our protests at this year's DSEi, we want to make sure that the arms fair doesn't come back to London in 2007. The DSEi organisers have booked themselves into the ExCel Centre biennially until 2011. Moreover, Reed Elsevier, the company responsible for organising DSEi, currently organises seven other arms fairs around the world - in Brazil, Taiwan, Singapore, the Netherlands and the UK.

What can be done? We must continue to pressure Reed Elsevier to give up…

1 July 2011Blog

 

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23 May 2011Blog

Jill Gibbon at the 2011 BAE Systems AGM

 

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16 April 2011Feature

As Peace News goes to press, Britain is once again bombing a Middle Eastern dictatorship that it previously helped to arm.

On the day that the UN security council passed a no-fly zone resolution, Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi threatened rebels: “We will come house by house, room by room.... We will have no mercy and no pity.”

In the areas under his control, Gaddafi’s programme of hunting down his political opponents house by house has been aided by £4.1m worth of military…

1 April 2011News

The involvement of US arms giant Lockheed Martin (LM) in this year’s census – due to take place on 27 March – has spurred calls for both a boycott and creative obstruction. One of the world’s largest arms companies, LM makes cluster bombs and Trident nuclear missiles, and is involved in surveillance for both the CIA and the Pentagon.

That its UK subsidiary has been awarded a £150m contract to process the census questionnaires for England and Wales has therefore angered many peace…

1 April 2011News in Brief

In early March, it became apparent that BAE Systems, Britain's biggest military manufacturer, was about to be punished by the US state department after the arms company's admission last year that it conspired to defraud the US and made false statements about its anti-bribery compliance programme. The guilty pleas, made to a US court, came as part of legal settlement with the US justice department on corruption-related allegations.
The admissions resolved conflicts with the justice…