THE SNP Government has no option but to review grants to arms firms supplying Israel after a major report concluded there is a genocide happening in Gaza, The National has been told.
On Thursday, Amnesty International published a 296-page investigation into the Israeli assault on Gaza since the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023. It found that Israel “committed and is committing genocide” as defined by the UN Genocide Convention, to which the UK is a signatory.
The report’s conclusions have put pressure on the UK Government to halt arms exports to Israel, with Amnesty warning that to continue to allow weapons sales would be “violating their obligation to prevent genocide”.
Writing in The National, Neil Cowan, Amnesty International’s Scotland programme director, said that the SNP Government had its own moral obligations to deal with – not least its grants to arms firms through Scottish Enterprise.
The Scottish Government body has given £3 million to weapons firms including BAE Systems, Leonardo, and Raytheon Systems since 2023. As the BBC reported last month, these grants are not subjected to human rights checks if they are below £100,000 – and no grant above this threshold has ever been blocked on human rights grounds.
Calling for an urgent review of the grants and process, Cowan wrote: “The Scottish Government must now finally acknowledge that – if Scottish Enterprise’s human rights checks routinely waive through funding for arms companies providing arms to a state carrying out genocide – then those checks are simply not credible.
“At best, they are insufficient. At worst, they risk complicity with the most serious of international humanitarian law violations.”
The Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise both insisted that the weapons firm grants do “not provide funding for the manufacture of munitions” and that the human rights safeguards in place are effective.
However, campaigners and opposition politicians have heaped pressure on SNP ministers in the wake of Amnesty International’s report.
"Public money should always be used for the public good, not to give subsidies to some of the world's biggest war profiteers. No human rights assessment worthy of the name could say otherwise.
"There are no excuses that can justify this complicity. How many more bombs will have to be dropped before the Scottish Government finally does the right thing and stops funding arms dealers?"
A spokesperson for the Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign said that the SNP Goverment had to “go beyond its call for the UK Government to ban arms sales to Israel and clean up its own act”.
“Firstly, accept the Amnesty report acknowledging that what Israel is doing is genocide and then end all financial support for arms companies that facilitate the genocide,” they went on.
“Nothing less will allow the Scottish Government to escape the conclusion that it is guilty of shameless hypocrisy.”
And Isobel Lindsay, the co-vice-chair of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said they welcomed the “important work that Amnesty International is doing to ensure that the horrors being inflicted on the Palestinians in Gaza but also in the West Bank are carefully documented”.
She added: “History will judge the US, UK and some European states as complicit in the destruction of Gaza and the attempt to humiliate and eliminate the Palestinians and their culture.
“The only support and resistance we can offer in Scotland is to ensure a complete boycott of Israel. The Scottish Government must ensure that all its agencies like Scottish Enterprise abide by this and publicise why they are doing so.”
“Scotland’s enterprise agencies have appropriate safeguards in place to ensure that any funding provided is used only for the specific purpose intended. Human rights due diligence checks are central to that process.
“Export licensing is reserved to the UK Government. The Scottish Government believes all arms sales to Israel must stop.”
A spokesperson for Scottish Enterprise said: “Our support for companies is consistent with Scottish and UK Government policies, and our Human Rights Due Diligence checks are fully compliant with Scottish Government guidance. These checks were used to assess companies we support currently and will be applied to future funding decisions.
“We take our Human Rights Due Diligence checks seriously, review the procedure regularly and update it as guidance evolves. For example, an updated Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights’ database of companies active in the Occupied Palestinian Territory was recently added to the list of independent resources used to perform our checks.
“We also continue to make it clear to companies, through legally binding contracts, that our funding and support can only be used to deliver agreed projects in Scotland. None of the projects we support involve the manufacture of munitions or weaponry.”
