Ms Niamh Ní Bhriain:

I hope to be able to respond to all of the matters. My starting point is the European Union's common position from 2008, that being, the European Union regulation, law or legal structure that oversees the export of arms outside the European Union. However, each member state interprets that and applies it in its own particular way with its own particular standards. There is no body that is overseeing how that is being applied or implemented on a member state level. Consider all of the weapon exports that have continued from the European Union to Israel, for example. We have seen a genocide taking place, which has now been formally confirmed by the United Nations. If we were upholding international law, it is clear that all such exports would have stopped immediately once the International Court of Justice made its interim ruling in January 2024. That is, if we were to be applying the European Union's common position on arms exports since 2008 with any kind of teeth, but we do not do that.

That is the European Union level. Each state on its own individual level has its own criteria for how it issues an export license. Export licences are attached to particular pieces of weaponry, so there might be an export licence for rifles, for example. The export licence might have been granted in 2009 but the rifles might not have been made and readied for export until much later. For example, Germany might not be making new licences to export to Israel, but all of the licences that are in place for the next five years or the like will continue. Therefore, there is often a licence but the actual product that is being licensed is not exported until much later. With those licences and exports, there is an end-user agreement. That is where the country involved with the export and the licence will have an agreement that the end place of use for that particular weaponry is Morocco or Algeria. I am just giving examples. It would be a particular place in a particular country.

There is no control over where the weapons actually end up. With the end-user agreements, there is no follow-up, there is no accountability and there is nobody to come in after the fact. We looked at a case of rifles that were being exported from Romania to Serbia and then they were going from there to the Democratic Republic of Congo and being used by the army in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We could actually map that in North Kivu these European Union weapons were being used for massive displacement of people locally. We looked at similar cases. I know about the Turkish drones because we looked at export from Europe to Turkey and those drones that I discussed were actually being used in Syria. There is absolutely no control, once a piece of weaponry leaves the European Union, on how it will be used. That goes for the components as well. Weapons will be built up with components from various different countries, licensed by one of those countries, and then exported. One of the things that the European Union is looking at now is to reduce or remove almost altogether the capacity for European Union member states to move components across the different countries without any restrictions at all. For example, if the Netherlands wants to send components to Belgium, there needs to be an export agreement in place between other European Union member states. There is now a move to get rid of that. Germany and France are pushing back against it because they are afraid that it might have implications for their market, and Germany and France are very significant and they control how these things go because that is where many of the big companies go. It is important to mention as well that there is a massive black market in weapons. Often, when there is an end-user agreement, it can be about weapons that will often end up in the black market. We looked at weapons that had been used in the wars in the Balkans in the 1990s and they ended up in Colombia, and being used much later on by FARC in Colombia. There is a massive amount of corruption in the arms trade. It is one of the most corrupt industries in the world.

On the question of risk assessment, there has been no risk assessment. I remember when I was here last. There been no time, but it is such an urgency we are told. I remember when I was here looking at the Act in Support of Ammunition Production, ASAP, and we could see this €500 million, we knew the companies which I will not name. However, it was very clear that this public money was going to go to companies that were at that particular moment arming and backing a genocide. That is not an exaggerated statement; it is a fact. We can see that these companies are exporting and they are being provided with public funds from the European Union and that will only get worse. There has been no risk assessment. There has not been any opportunity at all for any democratic entity, not the national Parliament nor the European Parliament, to discuss this.

On the question of where might the weapons be used, it is important to look at the countries that are involved. Off the bat, Ukraine is a key component in this. There are the European Union member states and there are the security and defence partnerships which involve Norway, Moldova, South Korea, Japan, Albania, North Macedonia and Britain. There is also the potential to include Canada. However, an essential component in this is Ukraine, and that is written into the documentation on SAFE. We documented, and it has been documented by the United Nations, that before the war broke out in Ukraine in February 2022, Ukraine was one of the biggest suppliers of weapons to the military junta in Myanmar. That should terrify all of us. If we are going to align all of this military support or however you want to frame it, then we would be sending these weapons to Ukraine. If the war were to stop tomorrow, those weapons would be worth a fortune. Is there anyone who would say these weapons could not be sent now from Ukraine to Myanmar to support the military junta there, for example? Going back to the risk assessment, it was actually flagged by military analysts, that this, even in military terms, is terrifying. All of these weapons are being put out into the world and there is absolutely no control over how they will be used.

On who benefits, I named a number of countries, of which Italy, France, Germany, Spain and the Netherlands are the bigger ones. However, on this particular fund, the SAFE fund, the top five are Poland, Romania, France, Hungary and Italy.