§ Lord Gladwin of Cleeasked Her Majesty's Government:
How the criteria announced by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs on 28 July 1997 (H.L. Deb., cols. 26–29) are used to assess applications for a licence to export arms or goods subject to control for strategic reasons, for the purposes of demonstration, trial, testing or evaluation. [HL3501]
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Foreign and Commonwealth Office (Baroness Symons of Vernham Dean)Licence applications to export goods and technology controlled under Part III of Schedule 1 to the Export of Goods (Control) Order 1994 (the "Military List"), or dual use goods when there are grounds for believing that the end-user of such goods will be the armed forces or internal security forces of the recipient country, are examined on a182WA case-by-case basis against the published defence exports criteria and the EU Code of Conduct.
When the application is for demonstration, trial, testing or evaluation purposes, attention is paid to the level of control exercised by the exporter and whether the export will be temporary, in arriving at a judgment as to whether the equipment might be used for internal repression, international aggression, diverted to an undesirable end-user or otherwise contravene the criteria.
If a decision is taken to issue such a licence, that in no way fetters our discretion in considering future applications for the export of equipment of the type demonstrated or evaluated. Such applications will be treated on their merits against the prevailing circumstances at that time.
In some cases, licensees will be informed that, on the information available at that time, a licence would not normally be granted for the permanent export of the same or a greater quantity of the goods concerned to the same end-user, irrespective of the purpose of the intended export.