§ Mr. FearnTo ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs if he will make a statement on the arms trade between Britain and Indonesia. [139402]
§ Mr. BattleThe expiry of the EU arms embargo last January has not opened the way to unrestricted arms sales to Indonesia. We continue to judge all cases against the consolidated EU and national arms export licensing criteria. We will for example refuse any applications for defence equipment where we judge there to be a clear risk that the proposed export might be used for internal repression. For this reason we have refused a number of applications for Indonesia and we have consistently refused to license small arms and small arms ammunition for the security forces. We also refuse arms where there is a risk they may be diverted to undesirable end-users such as extremists in Maluku.