Britain's Labour government promised the biggest changes in arms export legislation since World War Two today, bringing greater transparency and tighter controls on arms brokers.
Laying out plans for the next parliamentary session, Queen Elizabeth said the government would bring in a bill to build on changes in arms export controls introduced in its first term.
Legislation will be introduced to improve the transparency of export controls and to establish their purpose, she told the formal re-opening of parliament after Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour government was returned by a landslide on June 7th.
Government officials said the legislation would enable tighter controls to be placed on arms brokers, on the transfer of weapons information and technology, and on technical assistance.
It would curb the trafficking and brokering of weapons, prevent trafficking and brokering of any torture equipment to any destination, and increase the maximum penalty for offenders to 10 years from seven.
Arms control lobby groups gave a guarded welcome to the announcement but said it was not yet clear how effective the new legislation would be.
The campaigning group Saferworld said it wanted to see the controls on arms brokers apply to British brokers worldwide, ending a loophole on controls outside Britain.
It also said the proposals would not allow for the prior scrutiny of arms export deals by parliament - a key demand of a parliamentary committee investigating ways of monitoring Britain's multi-billion-dollar arms trade.
The Campaign Against Arms Trade said the government should provide more information in its annual report on arms sales, and called for more control over the end use of equipment the government had licensed for export.
Citing sales of military equipment in the last four years to areas of conflict including Indonesia, India, Israel, Zimbabwe and Morocco, it said Labour's first term in office had been marked by a serious deficit between policy as rhetoric and policy as substance .
The new Export Control and Non-Proliferation Bill will replace laws that have not fundamentally changed since 1939, meeting a commitment made by Labour four years ago in the wake of a damning report by Judge Richard Scott into the British sale of arms to Iraq in the 1980s. Labour's failure to act on the pledge in its first term in office led to charges that its vaunted ethical foreign policy was an empty slogan.