The Coalition for Defence Alternatives on Tuesday condemned what they saw as more secrecy and less oversight over arms exports.
Commenting on a hearing by the Portfolio Committee on Defence on the National Conventional Arms Control Bill on Tuesday, the watchdog said the draft law would shroud arms sales in greater secrecy and prevent parliamentarians and civil society from exercising meaningful oversight over arms exports.
”The Bill gives the National Conventional Arms Control Committee (NCACC) — a Cabinet committee established in 1995 ? formal authority to regulate South Africa’s arms trade,” the CDA said in a statement.
”The Portfolio Committee agreed last session that Parliament should be empowered to review and comment on prospective arms sales before the NCACC issued export permits. Today, the Secretariat asked that this clause be scrapped, which would mean that legislators would only learn about arms exports after they could no longer be stopped.”
The Defence Secretariat’s Director of Conventional Arms Control, Frederick Marais, also asked Parliament to suppress the release of information on arms deals to avoid ”embarrassing” foreign buyers.
He further asked that the NCACC’s annual public reports only divulge category and value of arms sold to each nation, without disclosing the type and number of weapons traded.
This could easily disguise otherwise unacceptable arms transactions, the CDA charged.
According to the statement, committee chairwoman Thandi Modise noted that such categories were used in the current NCACC report and this limited the value of the information given.
”A representative of the Secretariat responded that the Bill would still require the NCACC to provide more detailed information to parliamentarians. ‘We wouldn’t try to fob off the committee with a report like this,’ he reassured her, implying that such evasive tactics were reserved for the public at large,” the statement read.
”Committee members cited the huge exports of weapons in the most dangerous category to India — and smaller exports neighbouring Pakistan — as evidence of the need for more detailed information to enable meaningful oversight.
”Marais also indicated that the Secretariat is in the process of developing new policy on security classification that could mean that the NCACC’s quarterly reports to the parliamentary committee are classified. Thus, while members of Parliament might be supplied with more detailed information, they would be prohibited from discussing this with colleagues outside the committee, let alone defence and human rights experts outside of Parliament.”
Laurie Nathan, head of the Centre for Conflict Resolution and an advisor to the portfolio committee drafting team, pointed out that the Secretariat was required to provide the United Nations with much of the detailed information it wanted to withhold from its annual report.
”Since the United Nations’ reports are freely available on the world-wide web, South Africans would be forced to turn to United Nations documents to find information that their government would not supply to them,” the statement concluded. – Sapa