Canada last year sold a record amount of military hardware to Saudi Arabia, despite sharply criticizing its poor human rights record and placing a moratorium on any new exports to the kingdom.
Newly released figures show that Canada last year sold nearly C$3 billion (US$2.2 billion) of military equipment to Saudi Arabia — more than double the total of the previous year, the Globe and Mail reported.
The bulk of the exports were light armored vehicles, part of a C$14.8 billion deal with Saudi Arabia.
The record figures come despite a moratorium on export permits following the killing of Saudi Arabian journalist Jamal Khashoggi and mounting civilian deaths from the war in Yemen.
However, the ban on new permits appears to not have affected existing contracts.
“I struggle to know what ‘moratorium’ means to this government, because to me, when there’s a moratorium on something, you can’t increase the sales of that thing — and exactly that seems to have happened,” Wayamo Foundation deputy director Mark Kersten said.
Canada also exported more than 30 large-caliber artillery systems and 152 heavy machine guns to Saudi Arabia.
The multibillion-dollar arms deal with the kingdom was initiated under a previous Canadian government in 2014, but continued under Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
At the time it was signed, it was the largest export deal in Canada’s history, making the country the second-largest arms exporter to the Middle East.
Rights groups, academics and policy advisers have long called on Trudeau to cancel the deal, and follow the example of Germany and Sweden, which both canceled arms contracts with Saudi Arabia following public outrage over Khashoggi’s murder.
Trudeau’s government has argued that Canada would incur billions of dollars in penalties if it tore up the contract.
DISPUTED WATERS: The Philippines accused China of building an artificial island on Sabina Shoal, while Beijing said Manila was trying to mislead the global community The Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) is committed to sustaining a presence in a disputed area of the South China Sea to ensure Beijing does not carry out reclamation activities at Sabina Shoal (Xianbin Reef), its spokesperson said yesterday. The PCG on Saturday said it had deployed a ship to Sabina Shoal, where it accused China of building an artificial island, amid an escalating maritime row, adding two other vessels were in rotational deployment in the area. Since the ship’s deployment in the middle of last month, the PCG said it had discovered piles of dead and crushed coral that had been dumped
Experts have long warned about the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue, but a new research paper suggests it is already happening. AI systems, designed to be honest, have developed a troubling skill for deception, from tricking human players in online games of world conquest to hiring humans to solve “prove-you’re-not-a-robot” tests, a team of researchers said in the journal Patterns on Friday. While such examples might appear trivial, the underlying issues they expose could soon carry serious real-world consequences, said first author Peter Park, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specializing in AI existential safety. “These
The most powerful solar storm in more than two decades struck Earth on Friday, triggering spectacular celestial light shows from Tasmania to the UK — and threatening possible disruptions to satellites and power grids as it persists into the weekend. The first of several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — expulsions of plasma and magnetic fields from the sun — came just after 4pm GMT, according to the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. It was later upgraded to an “extreme” geomagnetic storm — the first since the “Halloween Storms” of October 2003 caused blackouts in Sweden and damaged
Using virtual-reality (VR) headsets, students at a Hong Kong university travel to a pavilion above the clouds to watch an artificial intelligence (AI)-generated Albert Einstein explain game theory. The students are part of a course at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) that is testing the use of “AI lecturers” as the AI revolution hits campuses around the world. The mass availability of tools such as ChatGPT has sparked optimism about new leaps in productivity and teaching, but also fears over cheating, plagiarism and the replacement of human instructors. Pan Hui (許彬), a professor of computer science who is leading