Dr Sam Perlo-Freeman, Paul Bennett, Helen Jones and Laura Harling respond to an article by a former diplomat on the UK’s complicity in war crimes

The testimony of the former Foreign Office policy adviser Mark Smith confirms exactly what the Campaign Against Arms Trade has been arguing for decades – the UK’s arms-export control system is rotten to its core (I saw illegality and complicity with war crimes. That’s why I quit the UK Foreign Office, 9 February). When we successfully took the government to court to stop arming Saudi Arabia, the key legal and moral questions were essentially the same. How could the UK government continue supplying arms in the face of overwhelming evidence of the most horrific crimes being committed against civilians?

What Smith’s evidence shows is that the only way for the Foreign Office to keep doing this is to bully civil servants and diplomats into changing their reports, warning them not to leave any written evidence, or even asking them to “delete correspondence”. There has been a systematic effort to manipulate and suppress the truth.